Archive for 2002/09


Programming for Dummies - 5:42PM, 2002/09/27

I looked at my assignments for next week, and even with the added one that’s due on Tuesday, it should be much more sane. (Since I’m already halfway done with two, and about a quarter done with the other.)

And no programming for Computational Biology next week! *screams of joy*. Last week’s program was !fun. It wasn’t a very hard program, but when you haven’t done anything but extremely basic javascript and php for 4 years — well, the pool is cold when you jump right in. I fortunately realized quite quickly that my knowledge of Java file I/O was not up to the task, so was forced to write the damn thing in C. It compiled. It ran. It took 25 minutes to finish. (What? Optimization? Exponential runtime? Never heard of ’em!) It looked right, and I wanted to go to bed, so I did not test it further. The problem is I -know- it would have been a better program if I’d written it in Java. Perhaps not faster, but at least more comprehensible. I need to buy a textbook.