First Appointment with Dr. Racket

Welcome ALL to my blog and I hope you enjoy your time here. I am just your average curious mind who wishes to learn about programming and this blog recounts my time spent with Dr. Racket. 

Many ask what is the importance of programming, what I'd like to ask how is programming not important in any way. In this era of technology where almost everyone has one type of electronic device, many do not know the full potential of those devices. Programming is also important in other fields of study. I'll give myself as an example, I am a life science student and when performing research experiments the organization and interpretation of the data recovered is a vital task. DNA is known to be the basis of life and all it is in reality is just a code composed of 4 letters meaning that life is simply information expressed in physical molecules. Thus the knowledge of creating programs capable of storing and managing the vast amount of data being uncovered in labs is important. By taking this computer science course I plan to expand my arsenal of skills by including knowledge of programming.

When I first heard about programming I thought it would be like what you see hackers do in movies, a bunch of incomprehensible sequence of letters and numbers used to hack into computers however that was not so. My first experience with programming was in high school where we had to design our own website without using the existing website making platforms on the internet. To my surprise programming was much easier than I initially thought, also since we were using the program Adobe Dreamweaver it was a bit easier to design the website. When I took this course I was thinking it would be somewhat similar to when I used Dreamweaver however that was not the case, though different, Dr. Racket is still pretty interesting and I feel that it fits my image of programming better. Only using codes for programming is more interesting and surprisingly it isn't difficult memorizing the different function calls. 

In my honest opinion I didn't think this course would be much fun and it would be a lot of memorization. However after the first few days of lecture I started enjoying myself. The thing that I found the most interesting was how simple codes can create different shapes. The different images and designs that were created truly blowed my mind. If you think about it letters and numbers don't leave much of an impact however later when you get their result it is truly baffling. So far we have only learnt of different functions and are just at the basics but however later I feel as we learn to apply these functions to create something that is when it will truly get interesting. As I said before that since we have just started to delve into the material overall the course is pretty easy. All the functions are much easier to remember than I initially thought and since I am a life science student one of my strong points is memorization. I can remember most of the stuff taught in lecture in just one go which make it easier to study for the quizzes. Just by going through the posted exercises at the end of the week I can ace my quizzes. I find that these weekly reviews are really helpful since you can refine the knowledge you gained in class and the exercise also considers the many simple mistakes a person could make by purposefully asking questions such as why would this statement produce an error. 

Since I am taking this course because I feel like it will help as I go into the field of research I'm interested in learning about computer graphics which will allow me to construct images of different organic molecules. I'm also interested in knowing how programs are developed since it will help me in creating my own program. Though I might not necessarily go into those fields I still wish to know a little about them to satiate my curiosity. Seems like this curiosity of mine will just make my life harder.