End of the term

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 3^rd 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.