Whilst I was under the impression that afternoon lectures started at ten past the hour, when I walked into L.G.01 at eight minutes past twelve, the class was already a few slides deep into what looked like colourful alien language. Those guys just seem to be really keen on learning their programming, and it was very clear that I was a giant out of place elephant in the room when I sat down. While everyone else was taking notes and answering/asking questions, I simply had an existential crisis.
Holy shit I just sat down and there’s some cryptic voodoo shit on the screen.
There’s five different colours of code on the screen right now and somehow I’ve forgotten how to read English.
The lecturer was talking about things called debugging and release while opening files that were sometimes empty and sometimes not empty, and I was pretty sure that every second word might not even belong to a real language. Luckily for them, the real students seemed to know what was being said, so kudos to them. My brain was fried, and I’d been sitting there for exactly four minutes. Moving onto saving and accessing files should have made a fraction more sense to my arts major brain, which did, but only for about two seconds. Then I was promptly very confused all over again, which is the state of mind I belonged in while in that lecture.
Any questions? Yeah, what the fuck.
I didn’t catch her name, but the lecturer who takes this class is an ICON. We had a little male duo talking over her in the back of the class, scrolling on their phones, and she went “I prefer if I’m talking, no one is talking”, and then stared them down. When I say stared, I mean stared, and it was dead silent in that room for the whole two minutes it took for these people to realise they were the ones being loud. Queen behaviour. She also wrote some stuff on the board which would be helpful if I knew what it meant, but to those that did, it was awesome that she did it visually for us to see as she explained it.
If this is an introduction to programming, I cannot even begin to comprehend what else falls under this subject. I mean, I was literally in programming 101, so in theory, it can’t get much easier. So many different colours of code would appear on the screen and all my brain could process with this information was ✨shapes and colours✨. Genuinely, I had nothing to understand about it.
BUT, it was a very cool class, even if I understood nothing and left with less brain cells than I entered with. While the lecture started early, it also ended early, which I can very much appreciate. The lecturer had some really good projection with her voice, which is helpful considering we were in one of the bigger sized lecture halls on campus, so she made sure no one missed anything. Overall, a very bamboozling experience.
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