I finally had a soul searching moment this week. I was working through week 9 notebooks and realised that I was just executing the code and moving on. This made me think about how I was studying and what it meant for the future. Finally, I posted the following in the Cafe forum.
"Am I unusual?
I have been programming since 1978. I started out in BASIC (taught to me by the OU in M251). In 1983, I switched to Pascal and in 1990 to Smalltalk (feeling that OO was the way to go). In all of that time, I have never set out to learn anything by rote or felt a demand to hold everything in my head. There was (and is) documentation available for me to check up on anything that I had forgotten (or even never known). As an example, I am currently getting to grips with Seaside - which is a package within most Smalltalk versions for creating web sites programatically. I am learning this by doing and thus, whenever I need to do something new, I look it up.
I have been going through the notebooks for week 9. I am finding it very difficult to carry out some of the SQL problems in the notebooks. My brain just doesn't let me create a complex programming statement or section of code without me "having to do it". Hence, I skim over these bits knowing that, if needed, I can read them again when I have to.
I should mention that I have made my living by programming in Smalltalk for many years.
Am I on my own in this (i.e. is it because I am 71 years old and my brain is failing - grin - although I have always been like this) or is this a common trait. Please help."
I got a couple of replies that indicated that I wasn't on my own. However, it made me carry out a retrospective on the recent TMA. I realised that I managed all the written stuff straight off but all the programming needed me to go back to the notebooks, my Pandas O'Reilly manual and god old stackoverflow.com! When I thought about it, that was how, even after 38 years of programming, I did my "day job".
Suddenly, I knew how to get on with this course. It should let me get quite a bit ahead, knowing that I will slow to a crawl through the next TMA (and probably the CMAs as well). Read all of the course books, giving them some time to sink in and skim through the notebooks to make sure that I know what is in them. Then,when the TMA comes along, I will have the time to run through the written work and struggle my way through the programming stuff. It helps that I am pretty familiar with SQL, Normalisation and inner/outer joins etc.
As an aside, I thought that I would let you follow what I am doing with my personal programming. At the moment I am writing a web log analysis package so that I can see what activity is going on with the web sites that I host on my personal web server. I know that I can get packages to do this but I will get a better understanding of the topic by writing the code. In passing, I was amazed at how many web crawlers there are out there. We only get about 10 hitting our sites but the real total is astonishing. This package is being written in Instantiations VisualAge Smalltalk - my eternal coding partner since 1994. I will describe it better when it is finished and working.
That's all for this week. I am worried about my TMA score so I check a few times a day to see if it has been posted. No luck yet!
Week 10 - facing up to my difficulties
I finally had a soul searching moment this week. I was working through week 9 notebooks and realised that I was just executing the code and moving on. This made me think about how I was studying and what it meant for the future. Finally, I posted the following in the Cafe forum.
"Am I unusual?