Hi, since the term is closing to an end, I thought I should
give my general overview and how I feel about this course.
I believe this course was very beneficial to me as it
provided a lot of fundamental insights on how computers and programs work and
the history behind them. My initial intention of choosing this course was to
familiarize myself with some of the basic intuition that is needed in order to
program. Being in 3rd year of Astrophysics specialist, I realized
how important programming is and that programming is inevitable in modern
science. In experimental physics, almost every apparatus is run by a program
and every data analysis is collected by using a program. This is the case
because doing anything manually always introduces new errors and it is not very
efficient when there are a lot of repetitive procedures.
At first, I really did not like programming as it was
something that I was not use to and I would always make small mistakes and not
know why I kept on getting errors. It was especially frustrating when you know
what to do in your head but you can’t seem to be able to code it with correct
syntax to make the program work. But after taking this course, I think I can
safely say that my confidence in programming has gone up. I also enjoy programming
these days as the feeling one gets when they finally get the program to work is
incredibly amazing.
The power of programming really shines when you need to do
something that’s repetitive and you find yourself doing it manually. It’s times
like those where you would rather have a program to do what you’re doing in a
second. Another beauty is that once you have a program do something very simple
like combining all the colours of pictures, or cropping a picture to a
background, it is re-usable whenever you need it again.
Overall, I really enjoyed this course as it was very a fun learning
new functions from Dr.Racket and all the history behind the creation of
computers and algorithms. I really hope this course remains available for many
more years as I think it is one of the most useful and interesting introductory
courses one can take in University of Toronto.