Flashes of Panic

With the programming project I just handed in (over half an hour early!) I’m now clear (aside from the omnipresent stack of grading,) well into next week, possibly for the first time this month. November has been pretty thick, work-wise, and even though I’ve had good days, this has been a rough week: first the fruitless all-nighter, then today getting the grade for the bombed quiz. (It was better than I’d feared; I almost went to the professor to argue that I had a higher grade than I deserved.)

So much the better that this assignment went in on time and, for once, with me feeling like I’d met and possibly exceeded the parameters of the assignment. This particular course has been my first extensive experience coding in Java, and while I can’t say that I like it (I still prefer PHP,) it’s getting easier, and I’ll be able to apply what I’m learning to other languages. A big part of programming is learning patterns of thinking, and it’s the ease with which the hacker can implement the ideas in their head that makes them prefer particular languages over others. (That, and suitability to tasks, but that overlaps.) Learning other languages provides new ways of thinking.

A big step towards becoming more comfortable with Java was downloading and installing Eclipse on my Powerbook. Eclipse is an IDE (Integrated Developer Environment) for Java, and it happens to be open-source and cross-platform. It has the usual range of bits like syntax coloring and auto-completion which make it a notch above a text editor, but what helps more than anything is its error-checking (it highlights errors and suggests fixes,) and the ease with which it lets me flick around the many files a Java project produces. I even found myself using the “Refactor” menu, pushing properties and methods up into abstract parent classes. I kept being tickled by how easy things could be.

I understand there are plugins galore to allow one to customize and extend the program, but I’m not quite there yet. Also, the Mac version is still a “Carbon” application, which may run natively in OS X but displays some funkiness. (For some reason, it won’t stay in the dock.)

Meanwhile, it’s time for me to try to get ahead so I don’t get this slammed again at the end of the semester.

Now Playing: Used Cars from Badlands: A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska by Ani DiFranco