MATLAB Troubles

I know I did say I was going to write about my first week back at Cornell, but it’s actually not all that interesting, so I’m going to focus on my Intro to CS class.  It’s technically called Introduction to Computing Using MATLAB, but I will refer to it as either Intro to MATLAB or MATLAB from here on out.

I’ve never taken a programming class before, so everything has been completely new to me.  So far I really like the class, especially the actual programming.  During lectures, it’s a little weird learning about how to code without actually getting to code, but the professor is enthusiastic about the class, which is always a positive.

As of a few days ago, I coded my first entire program (we calculated the surface area of an oblate spheroid) with the extensive help of MATLAB’s error detection system.  Honestly, if anyone got a nickel for every time I forgot to end a line with a semicolon, they’d probably be rich by the time I finish this class.  Or at least have enough money to pay for next semester’s textbooks.

Then there’s all those things that aren’t necessary, but are “good form.”  When creating my Intro to ChemE spreadsheets last semester, I was in the camp of people-who-don’t-want-to-scroll-a-lot, so everything would kind of be shoved into whichever cells I could see on one screen of Excel.  Similarly, if I didn’t have that 80-character-per-line good form limit, why waste time scrolling when you can jam five short lines of code into one long line the width of your computer screen?

By the way, who decided that we need both a slash and a backslash?  I found out the difference when I was trying to do a line return after a printed statement.

I’m really not complaining about the class or MATLAB, but rather, pointing out my sometimes utter disregard for style.  Apparently things not only have to work, but also look pretty.

Can’t think of a good way to finish this post, so I’ll go with this one:

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