Reading response A
Paul Ford:What is Code
"Which is to say I’m not a natural. I love computers, but they never made any sense
to me. And yet, after two decades of jamming information into my code-resistant brain,
I’ve amassed enough knowledge that the computer has revealed itself. Its magic has
been stripped away. I can talk to someone who used to work at Amazon.com or
Microsoft about his or her work without feeling a burning shame. I’d happily talk to
people from Google and Apple, too, but they so rarely reenter the general population."
I love learning languages, it allows me to communicate with people around the world,
learn about their culture. There has been a lot of different languages dominating in the
world, English, French, Chinese, etc. Apart from the spoken languages with a long history
in the human world, languages used in the digital world, are becoming more trending
nowadays. Computer science has always appeared to be the hardest thing for me to pick up,
espcially programming languages. I have had a few basic programming lessons back in
junior high school. It was fine, as we were just copying the codes from the lecture notes,
not much thinking is required. Until 2 years ago, when I was in college, I met a friend
who is so proficient in programming, and got very good result from the course. Under
persuadsion, I took that course in the following semester, and it was a total disaster
that I have completely lost faith in the learning programming languages, even though I
know it could bring me to a whole new world once I managed to understand it. I started
to doubt that maybe I am not those who are born to be good at computer science, unlike my
friend. And maybe I should give up learning computer science. Yet, when I was
choosing what courses to take during this summer session, this course Introduction to
Interactive Design: World Wide Web raised my interest in this field again, I really wish
it could help me to reopen the door to the digital world. As time goes by, I started to
gain more interest, as well as understanding in the programming languages. I am so glad I
am really making progress in this aspect.
When I was reading 'What is Code', this passage evokes my resonance, it makes me feel that
I am not the only one who are not born to be good at comprehending programming languages,
and it is totally fine to be so. From time to time, as we read and work more with it, I
stated to gain more confidence in it and the computer somehow started to reveal itself to
me bits by bits. I think I am somehow experiecning the similar stage as Paul did, though they
are in a completely different level. Though there are still quite a lot of difficulties during
the learning and the practices, I feel that things would get better and better.
Back