#bob tabor

[semioticapocalypse]

Bob Tabor. Horse 91. 2014

I Am Collective Memories   •    Follow me, — says Visual Ratatosk

[quidcumque]

Learning Opportunities aka “NOW WHY DID THAT BREAK IT”

So I'm a mid-30's career changer, and I know that the best way to learn programming is to poke it. I'm doing the C# Fundamentals for Absolute Beginners and while each video is ~15-20 minutes, I spent about four hours on the Methods one because I decided to get Fancy

To teach Methods, he had a pre-written Name Game (enter first name, last name, and birth city when prompted, and it reverses them) that worked, but had an ungodly amount of repetition and bloat. He then showed several different ways of streamlining it into Methods so you only had to type things out once, right? 

I try to change  things up to make sure I'm understanding rather than copying, so since it was about reversing the input I made a "90's Satanic Scare" version. Console warns against secret mind-control messages in your children's music, so you enter three lines of "your child's favorite song" and then it says oh no, the secret message is {input written backwards}. Slightly more complicated than his, because I wanted to flip the strings ALL the way around, not just backwardsFirst backwardsSecond backwardsThird but the full play-the-record-in-reverse treatment. AND, third complication, I pause the videos and try to complete things myself before it’s fully explained

Also I slightly skim when I read

All this to say that changing two things would have saved me about three hours:

If I’d watched a little further into his explanation of WHY you would overload Methods (ie have more than one version with the same name), because I might’ve processed the implications of what he’d said about input parameters

If I’d read the FULL text of the goddamn error popup, which said not “would you like to continue running anyway?” but “would you like to run the last successful version?” BECAUSE THEN I might not have generated many and increasingly flummoxed notes about why I wasn’t getting repeatable results --not at first realizing it was INCONSISTENT results, but thinking I’d mixed up my various versions, thus generating more confusion because my mental list of code combinations I THOUGHT I must have tried was getting longer and longer

GodDAMN, though, I understand the hell out of this particular section of bullshit, now

[semioticapocalypse]

Bob Tabor. Horse 94. 2015

I Am Collective Memories   •    Follow me, — says Visual Ratatosk

[geditionsbuzz]

From Bob Tabor’s Horse/Human: An Emotional Bond, 2015. 

Grab your copy here, http://amzn.to/1UnwSyE