As I said in my response to the form, I have taken COMP 110 (Java). My experience with that includes one “successful” semester (where I basically lived in the FB-Sitterson waiting for the TAs to hold help sessions), and a summer semester course I unfortunately had to drop, because I just wasn’t getting it. After a really fun and engaging first day in INLS 560, I became cautiously optimistic, but after doing the readings, I upgraded to pure optimism.

I feel like it can be hard to match my enthusiasm for making, especially when I get to customize what I make with color, so the first in-class exercise really drew me in. I also feel like I was left with a clear idea of what I feel I need to learn to make my first image really look the way I want it to (something about angle/slope), without being too dissatisfied with my final submission. I’m also glad to have gained some more experience and guidance with GitHub. I have known about GitHub for a very long time as I frequently encounter it when I’m looking for themes for Tumblr, but never thought my coding skills would be to a point where I would use it, so being instructed to use it from the very beginning of class makes me feel hopeful and excited.

During class, I was wondering about what was required to set up a Python program and when we would have to discuss that. Looking at Trinket, compared with what I encountered in Python, I was wondering where all the gross formatting nonsense was and whether it was purposefully not included to make learning Python easier. I was excited to see Python’s actually easier/more intuitive when I saw the comparison of Java to Python in the first reading.

In terms of the homework, I felt like the trickiest thing was switching the stings to integers and back to strings. I couldn’t get the int() or float() function to work as a standalone in either of my programs, so I finally just defined a new variable as float(name of old string variable). I feel like this may have been adding unnecessary steps, but I did get the desired result doing it this way.