Buffer Overflow

Life has been disrupting my study time a lot in the last week. I finally got some uninterrupted time to power through a lot of lessons and assignments to get caught up yesterday. About 8 hours in I was feeling a lot like that classic Far Side above.

With the intensity of some of my study sessions I worry about retention. I promise myself I’ll go back and run through all these basics again to reinforce what I’m learning. Time constraints may make that a difficult proposition. But at least I am reinforcing what I learn as I encounter different concepts in different contexts and can thus build complex interconnections of neural pathways.

In programming for a computer, simple and elegant are ideal. Make things work in the least complex fashion and eliminate potential points of failure through conscious design and careful implementation.

In programming a human brain the more ways you can find to build pointers to new knowledge the better it will stick. Perhaps that’s why I write mental methods to describe processes I encounter in the world. And revisit them when I learn more about Ruby, refining and refactoring.

puts "Number of wags?"
wags = gets.chomp.to_i

def tailwags(wags)
	side = "right"
	wags.times do
	    puts side
    	if side  == "right"
    		side = "left"
    	elsif side == "left"
    		side = "right"
    	end
    end
end

tailwags(wags)

I was watching water boil the other day, trying to picture the code I would write to describe the transformation of thermal to exothermic to kinetic energy that happens when water boils. I don’t have that one yet, perhaps in the future.

Hmm… now I’m relating this back to OOP and trying to decide if I should define a Class for Boil and define Methods for types of energy transformations and for the chemical process of breaking apart the H₂O molecule within that Class.

There we have it. Interconnections. Reinforcing each bit of new knowledge I gain about Ruby by connecting it back to other knowledge that is already in my brain. Sometime this takes me off on tangents. (Like when I use the word ‘tangents’ and then flash on writing a method to compute tangents to a circle, and a Method to circumnavigate a circle within a Class for Circle… which takes me back to my Logo days and “down turtle” as I program the computer to draw a circle.)

This trippy programming-of-yore flashback has been brought to you by the letter: ə

See? Buffer Overflow. Perhaps it’s time for a reboot. :-)

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

~AMP