Week 9 - A New Stairway

Leaving behind the CST 300, I stopped briefly at a stairway landing before turning to another flight of stairs: CST 338: Software Design. Even though this is not my first time using Java, I have spent lots of time with C# and that created many obstacles for me in this week’s Codingbat assignments in CST 338.

            The first obstacle in Codingbat is it doesn’t have a complier and a terminal. Without complier, I wouldn’t discover my mistakes in my codes until I hit run. For the terminal, I usually need it to know if my variables have mutated correctly or the errors are from somewhere else. Therefore, I need to be very careful, from thinking to coding on Codingbat. Plus, these assignments make me feel like working on paper tests like I did in previous computer science courses, which were not negative experiences.

            Another funny obstacle I encountered with Java itself is the different syntax and methods from C#. In C++ and C#, which I use a lot in my career, have “= =” and “+=” for strings that are very convenient. However, in Java, I have to use equals() method and “ string1 = string1 + string2” instead. Those differences cause some of my time because I got dwelled in “tunnel vision”. In other words, I thought the problems were from some other lines of code (my substring) rather than checking those two.

            However, in the end, everything is done properly, and lessons are learned. Much useful knowledge such as lambda functions will help a lot later. Plus, I keep learning to drag myself out of “tunnel vision” so that I may plan and solve the problems earlier and cleaner.