Week Two

The second week of class has come and gone, along with came many beneficial aspects of the class.

 

For one, the instructor decided to allow the class to write the code in Python 3 if they wanted. This is a prime example of how the professor truly cares about his students doing well in the class. It shows he went through people’s blogs and found that enough people mentioned the discrepancy between classes in the Elements Program to consider altering the assignment. This is an amazing gesture on his part, and, not that I wish to look a gift horse in the mouth, perhaps too accommodating. Please let me explain, I know I did mention how the other Elements classes use Python 3, but it was not with the intention of having him change that aspect, rather I merely wanted to point out that there is a bit of a hurdle to the class. Hurdles are not necessarily a bad thing. One thing about the computer industry I have heard about is that software and languages go through changes very quickly, but at different paces. So a recent program could be running and using a language that may be considered outdated when it comes out. And not all companies have the money to continually update their software and make due with older versions that still work. For example there are some broadcast companies which use Photoshop CS4, even after CS5 and CS6 came out, because all their other templates, software and hardware are compatible only with CS4. In such cases, even if you are incredibly knowledgeable about a language or program you may find yourself in a situation where you must use older versions of said language or program, and you may not get the luxury of the manager bending over backwards to try and update everything for a single person or group. I want to emphasize that I really appreciate what the professor did, but I wanted to point out how the original arrangement had its academic advantages.

 

The second thing which occurred is the first study session with the TAs, which was extremely beneficial to learning how to work GitHub and how to work on the assignment. So I recommend going to them if you can.