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Everyone has to start somewhere....
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""" | |
This was the first challenging programming assignment I ever tried to complete, | |
given as an early homework question when I took CS220 (Introduction to Programming with Python) | |
in Fall 2011 at the College of Charleston (we had just learned about conditionals and iteration). | |
I was 21 years old, and was learning computer programming for the very first time. | |
The prompt was: "write a program that takes as input a symbol and a number, then prints a center-justified | |
pyramid of the given symbols and the height of the given number." | |
I stayed overnight in the computer lab, chugging energy drinks and banging my head against the desk | |
trying to figure it out. I probably spent around 8 hours staring at the computer screen, mystified by how difficult | |
it was. I'm not kidding. I went through multiple attempts to figure it out, failing each time and producing probably | |
30 or 40 lines of code each time. In the morning, one of the seniors came in before class and showed me a solution | |
(using nested loops). | |
I retried this problem in August 2020, approximately 9 years after that first attempt. It took 3 minutes, | |
half of which was spent figuring out how to get the pyramid to look pretty. | |
Everyone has to start somewhere. | |
""" | |
def pyramid(symbol, count): | |
for level in range(count): | |
print((level * (symbol + " ")).center(count * 2)) | |
pyramid("", 3) | |
pyramid("#", 3) | |
pyramid("$", 5) | |
pyramid("A", 10) | |
pyramid("A", 0) |
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I had similar situations. For example, when I first tried to read the C Programming Language, i struggled with this exercise about drawing a vertical histogram of character frequencies. I Could easily solve the horizontal version, but had no idea where to even start to do the vertical version. A couple years later, I could've easily solve. I didn't read anything specific about that problem or worked with anything similar. The solution just came naturally. I kinda feel like there is some type of learning which we don't and cannot track that somehow happens in the background of our minds from constant exposure.