My First Programming Experience!

At this point in time I have officially done my first bit of programming and I am quite proud of myself! Programming has always been a huge mystery to me, so getting some basic insight into what the term "programming" even means has been extremely enlightening.

Before beginning the course I was worried that I didn't have enough computer knowledge in general in order to be taking a computer science course, but soon after the lecture began I found that was not true at all. So far all of the programming that we are supposed to be doing has been well explained, and the videos provided by the instructor proved to be extremely helpful. Typically I don't have a problem following written instructions, but being able to see exactly what needs to be inputted into DrRacket is quite helpful.

The instructor decided to use DrRacket because of the clarity of the error messages it provides to beginners, and this is really helpful as well. The only difficulty that I have come across so far is memorizing the inputs. DrRacket makes it really easy to figure out your mistakes from the error messages, but error messages aren't a luxury available to you on a written quiz. I find that sometimes the order that the values need to go in isn't always intuitive to me, so I need to spend a bit more time memorizing that information. For example when creating a solid, blue circle, there is nothing in my brain that makes me remember size comes before "solid" which comes before the colour. To me I could write "blue" 150 "solid" and it means the same thing. A lot of review, and I was able to remember the correct order. I don't know that I would necessarily call this issue a "difficulty" but at the moment it was the only challenge presented to me after the first tutorial.

One final difficult I have been having is remembering that we are using DrRacket, and not DrRatchet, which I seem to be calling it.

I'm really looking forward to continuing on with the programming, and maybe eventually doing something that I can see being put to use.