Something Significant
I can safely say that pretty much everything I learned in this class was something new to me. I never really thought of myself as someone who would ever learn to do even the most basic coding. "Computers make websites with magic and pixie dust," went my line of thinking. The idea of even breaching the subject was so completely imposing.
I mean, obviously I had seen lines of code before. But I guess I always imagined that a developer built a website the same way an artist draws a painting. I think it's really interesting that a website is essentially built of tiny instructions you give to the computer.
The artist analogy still holds up, I suppose. But it is a vastly different set of tools serving both function and form at the very same time. That has been something I've found difficult to wrap my brain around.
A lot this hasn't come easily. Learning to see the basic building blocks of a website has been a real challenge for a luddite like me. I think it's significant that I can look at the code for a site and see the basic structural elements that put it all together. It helps a lot to see tags and elements that were heretofore unknown to me like header and footer (like I said, I was pretty much starting from zero) and recognizing them as pieces of the whole. It might not be a lot, but at least I have a foundation for understanding.
I mean I still find the Bertrand Russell logic-ese of the PHP delimeter completely impenetrable, but I've found myself kind of fascinated by the straightforwardness of that logic all the same. A computer does exactly what you tell it to do, not necessarily what you want it to do.
Seems significant to me.
