Stuff and nonsense

2021-08-09T01:57:06Z

-Love writing for submission calls with big length windows. Like..."I'm somewhere between 50% to 250% done with this piece!" :D
-From exchange chat discord:

orange jacket guy shakes his head generic rock songs about love

orange jacket guy nods yes angsty rock songs about relativistic time dilation

^ me

-(I am having feelings about '39 in a Crying Suns context. I am having lots of feelings in a Crying Suns context! But between silly exchanges, high-commitment exchanges, and aforementioned submissions calls, it will be a while before I circle back to my non-exchange Crying Suns stuff. There will be plenty of it, however! At some point!)

-Also me:

Orange jacket guy shakes his head at intermediate Python documentation hyping up "object-oriented programming" by how you can define custom things like "classes" and "subclasses," so you can make Fido as a member of the class Dog which is a subclass of Animal. And you can assign variables to them like legs=4, and functions like woof() which prints "woof woof," because they feel very indirect and strange--like why would you use "self" as a dummy variable when it isn't doing anything?

Orange jacket guy also shakes his head at spreadsheet-based examples. Like if I wanted to make Joe as a member of the class Customer and have things like zip_code = 12345, bill=49.99, I would just use...a spreadsheet, or some other kind of array/matrix storage format, either in Python or something else.

Orange jacket guy, however, nods appreciatively at the idea of using Python classes to simulate complicated card games like Keyforge. To be clear, I am very very far from implementing any actual cards, but I can now see why you would want to have "power," "defense", "damage," "money captured" as variables assigned to Creatures, which is a subclass of Cards, and how you want to dynamically update them over time through functions like reap() (no input variable) and fight(creature in position X in opponent's battleline)!

I'm a nerd of many facets, and sometimes, I really like it.

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Variables

2020-06-02T16:13:42Z

I'm taking a course to brush up on my Python skills. (Which aren't many, but so far what I've seen is fairly basic/review. I suspect by the end of the week we'll be learning things that are new to me?) You don't need to know a lot about programming to follow this: (normal is input, bold is output)

x = 10
(this tells the computer what x is. x is now 10)
x + 2
12
(the computer added 2 to x, which is 10, and got 12).
x = 5
(now I give the computer a new value for x. it forgets about the 10 and goes with 5 instead)
x + 2
7
(get it?)

Anyway we're supposed to be learning/reviewing what is a "list" versus a "tuple" etc. right now. But this instructor likes to get sidetracked on how the "memory" works in Python, "stacks" versus "heaps" etc. Again, don't worry too much about what all this means.

x = (1,2)
(I told the computer I want x to be a "tuple," like an ordered pair on a graph.)
y = [0, (5,6), x]
(I made a list called y, whose third element is the tuple called x.)
x = 5
(the same way we did above, we forget that x used to be a tuple, now it's the integer 5. tuples and integers are different "types," but that's okay, x can be anything.)
y[-1]
(asking the computer to output the last element in the list y. course pauses, thinks about what this should be.)
The answer is...
(1,2)
because at the time we defined y, the last element was x, and at that time, x represented (1,2). Even though we've changed x since then, we haven't done anything to y. So as far as the computer knows, the last element of y is (1,2).

Now, this kind of abstract thinking is necessary not just in Python, but I would assume pretty much any programming language, to be able to keep track of what your variables represent and why. And, because I'm an abstract-thinking person and have experience with Python, this is pretty straightforward for me.

But this also seems to be a more 21st-century form of the Sally-Anne test! (Which...doesn't seem to be that reliable a metric anyway, perhaps this is a case in point.)

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primeideal

Stuff and nonsense

Variables