CS371p Fall 2021: Blog 11

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I was able to submit all the assignments I had due on time, and then was able to get started on my upcoming projects. It is getting to the point in the semester where all of my classes are wrapping up, which is exciting but also a bit stressful. I have been struggling a bit to understand the Darwin assignment, but going over the requirements in detail on Wednesday was very useful and gave me a lot of great ideas about how to approach the problem.

What’s in your way?

My main issue right now is just stress from the semester coming to an end. There are only around 4 weeks of class left, but I feel like there are still so many assignments left to do.

What will you do next week?

This week, I plan on wrapping up Darwin, and hopefully making a lot of progress on my compilers assignment. For compilers, we’ve been building a Pascal parser for most of the semester; the last two checkpoints weren’t too difficult, but for this last one we have to add support for complicated datatype declarations, which takes a lot more work than a lot of the previous requirements.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #11: Getters and Setters?

This was a really important article, both for the current project and programming in general. Most programs I have seen in Java, for instance, include getters and setters, and so I have always assumed that it’s a natural part of object oriented design. However, this reading made it clear that it’s actually somewhat of an antipattern when it comes to object oriented design.

What was your experience of vector?

I thought that the vector exercise made a lot of sense, and it was especially good practice for the class declaration syntax in C++. We saw all of the same syntax in Allocator, but a lot of it had already been written for us. In this case, I feel like I finally have a deep understanding of const vs non const methods, and the syntax used for destructors and initializer lists.

What made you happy this week?

Even though I had a pretty late registration time, I was able to get into all the classes that I wanted / needed for next semester thanks to my advisor. I’m looking forward to my last semester, since I won’t be worried about looking for a job and will have an interesting, relatively light workload.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

This is a pretty general tip, but I think it’s really useful to learn as many keyboard shortcuts as possible for your IDE of choice. There are a lot of really simple shortcuts (like shift-tab for removing a tab from a line/lines) that, when added together, makes writing code a lot more convenient and enjoyable.