seperis | for my next trick, staring into the sun

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So. Multidimensional arrays. Well.

See, I thought hell was classes. No. Hell was functions? No. Is hell, in fact, a two dimensional array? Actually, no.

Hell is a book that acts like they are just two arrays brought together magically.

Starting on Friday, through midnight Sunday, I suffered under the delusion that all I had to do was create two arrays, then bring them together with magic. Like this.

table[array1][array2]

Voila! Your work here is done. Or so the book says.

And I'm sure in some universe--the example in the book, say--that works. You might be surprised to know I cried, considered drowning myself, and opened up The Erdős–Faber–Lovász conjecture to stare at (speaking of, I'm still not sure why two people can't just belong to one committee period, because that would short circuit that entire issue right off the bat). And let me tell you, when working on unsolved graphing problems you don't even understand is preferable to spending any amount of time looking at your two dimensional array? You have reached hell.

(Seriously. Why can't two people work only one committee? I'm also weirded out by the fact the entire thing really looks neat if it's k chairs, k people and k+1 committees. I don't even know what that means but the graph has four colors and is deeply, deeply awesome and also congruent, which satisfies the small part of me that likes everything to be balanced. I ended up trying to do it three dimensionally but again, no toothpicks. I also gave the people names. Perhaps off my flist. It was more fun that way).

But you know what's so much easier than both of these? Treat the fucker like an address.

table[rows][columns]

I keep going back to read the book and they just do not even imply that. They don't! They initialize it, or enter data from it, but nowhere does it say, "Oh, by the way. Please don't take this literally. This is an address." An address. A pointer, though not officially, if you will. You don't have to create an array to take your data before hand! No, this one can do it all on its own!

One. Line. Would. Have. Saved. My. Sanity.

The only comfort I have atm is that the average grade on this is very low so far. Still have searching the char array to do (Pretty sure this isn't going well; my first attempt last night ended up with strange results that might be, oh, crazy) and organizing the data. Yeah.

I always wondered about people who said they could pass a class easily and never learn anything. It scares me that it's very possible without a lab practical, which makes me wonder why on earth there isn't one for this.

I wish there were other news, but really. Really close to writing a sternly worded letter to the book person to use examples that are, say, clearer. Using the Angry Snail Icon of Anger.

And let me tell you, when working on unsolved graphing problems you don't even understand is preferable to spending any amount of time looking at your two dimensional array? You have reached hell.

Oh, god. This is exactly where I am right now. I laughed my ass off when i read this, and if that laughter was somewhat manically tinged...I know you understand why. Who new there was a worse hell than classes?

Classes seem like a snap now. Seriously, I wrote one into this program for fun so as to feel entirely less stupid than I did with the arrays.

Hee! I write pointless GUI code so I have something to point and go 'See! see! can do it!'

It's so freakin' demoralising.

Oh man, if you can write pointless GUI code, FEEL SPECIAL. LOL I probably still can only make Java post on alert window on a good day. :p I always worked around it by doing every single problem possible as a web application in college. I got away with it way more than I should have, too.

-Bree

The latest assignment uses a GUI, which I spent hours and hours on because the rest of it scares me silly and I'm avoiding it. It might not actually *do* much of anything, but damn if i don't have the prettiest GUI in the class :D

What stupid book is this?

Multidimensional arrays are fun, and useful, and fun. I'm sorry the book made them way more difficult then they should have been :/

Have you done linked lists?

Okay, now I LOVE multidimensional arrays...but I HATE linked lists.

My brain thinks in arrays. I still can't take an object out of freaking queue without breaking it. My dream was haunted by "null pointer exceptions" for a very, very long time. ;)

Of course, now that I've graduated I can just use other people's linked list code. :D

-Bree

LOL, YES!
We did linked lists first, and they so broke my brain. I could use them now, if I needed to, which I don't, pretty much ever. Then we went on to arrays and that made so much more sense.

Hah, I had dreams about how the items in my linked lists would just...move around all by themselves >.< Then it would be all out of order, and I'd never know, and I think somewhere I had some sort of linked list loop...It was bad times for sure.

My least favorite thing EVER was when we had to implement a priority queue. God, it just all seemed so NEBULOUS! My information was floating around there in no man's land with only pointers to access them at all, and the minute you mess up that pointer...

Bah! Give me an array any day. :D Especially since I do a lot of programming in PHP now, and the only advantage linked-lists had in most firmly structured languages is gone in PHP since arrays can be of variable non-declared length. :D

Gosh, I sound like such a dork. LOL

-Bree

I think that is what scared me the most about linked lists, objects could just disappear....

We have lists and other fun collection objects in Java that make linked lists just not useful.

Hahaha...programmer squee

...I wandered off to make a visual aid for arrays that included Karl Urban biting some woman's chin.

This is why I can never be a teacher outside of fandom. ;)

I'm such a big geek though. :D I have programmer squeeeeee. Right now I'm doing work for a website with databases and crazy arrays and being buried in that code has brought out my full-on geek.

-Bree (who signs her name because there are two people using this journal, /random disclaimer)

With that sort of incentive aid, I'd sign up for any of your classes ;)

And the programmer squee? Comes with the territory, at least for us programmers who don't get to talk to other programmers much. :D (I'm so glad I still get excited about it, once you're not excited, get out of the field, too much work if you don't enjoy it.)

*needs a geek icon*

They are! When it finally made sense, I was like--oh. Jesus. God. You are kidding me. Even now, though I have to stare at my program and say THESE ARE COORDINATES. ON A GRAPH and that snaps me into the right place.

Hahahaha. Seriously. Table[x][y]

A 2d array is a matrix, plain and simple.

And I LOVE them. I love them.

I have, in fact, used a 3d array once because multi-dimensional arrays just make me that damn happy.

If you ever wanna see 2d arrays in lots of action: http://www.cis.uab.edu/breecita I have my code posted still for that. It's a project I did for my Multimedia Database class that pretty much analyzes pictures on a pixel by pixel basis and compares pictures based on their content.

And I really, really want to load it full of hot actors and see if it can start recognizing them. My plan is for it to become sentient, turn into Skynet, and start manufacturing thousands of clones of very, very hot men since that's what it specializes in.

:D

-Bree

3 dimensional arrays are so made of WIN. I use them, and I marvel at how everything is all right *THERE* together, happy, organized, wonderous.

*narrow eyes* If it had just *said* address? I would have been so much happier.

Oh, I won't argue with you there. People are CRAP at teaching this. Textbooks are almost useless.

Seriously, the only reason I figured any of this out was because I kept trying and trying and trying. The sad but true truth is that I just continued to be confused until I suddenly GOT it.

And getting it rarely had to do with teaching. :p

It's one of the reasons I want to teach some days. Maybe I'm not perfect, but I KNOW how useless some of the tired old ways of explaining it are.

-Bree

I'm in the middle of a deep sulk, because I have this horrible feeling I will default back into thinking of it like two bonded arrays and cry.

...seriously. Looking back, that was just insane.

If you forget, look at this:

(If I were a teacher, I would teach everything with arbitrary pictures of hot people doin' it. Maybe I shouldn't be a teacher.)

-Bree

OMG, best teaching aid EVER.

Maybe there needs to be a fandom programming class. "Learning Data Types with Hot Actors and Actresses."

Man, I'd take that. You know, to refresh my knowledge. ;)

-Bree

I'll teach if you do the....aids. :D

We can all be....refreshed.

*insert some witty remark about linked lists and 7 degrees of separation...*

On the contrary, you SHOULD be a teacher. Mmmmm.

Why thank you! :D With my large collection of hot pictures, you'll all be programming in no time. ;)

I already do! But clearly, I'm in need of the refresher course, because somehow my 2D arrays never seem to have Karl Urban in them.

(I'm also prone to long boring rants about how CS is traditionally taught, and could be taught better, and might do better if better addressed to different personalities/learning styles. Including what is clearly a large and untapped population of what are not just visual learners, but OMG KARL URBAN GOING TO TOWN ON THAT WOMAN'S CHIN learners.)

HAHAHA!

Yes, yes he is going to town (http://www.tapfer.org/karlurban/urban2.jpg) all right and I just gotta say...I feel inspired to learn. :D

I seriously learned so little from actual classes. I was somewhere in the middle of my Algorithms & Data Structures class before I really "got" classes and objects. I understood scope somewhere in the middle of my Programming Languages class, when I was building a bloody interpreter from scratch. (And oh, ouch. OUCH. Still the most painful experience of my young life.)

I actually explained Classes/Objects to someone using fanfiction once. It turned out to be a really good analogy! Much better than the freaking car or frogs or whatever the textbooks are prattling on about this week.

-Bree

*sad* Cars, Ford, transistors. We all stared blankly until Blueprints, House. Then I sat down and thought, functions with added variables. That (mostly) did the trick.

Yep. Damn CARS. I HATE that one!

I seriously didn't completely understand the point of encapsulation until I built the W/R archive that first time. LOL Or rather, when I sat down to try to make changes to it. Then I was like "...crap. THAT'S what encapsulation means. Not having to edit every. damn. file. because my data is being changed outside of the class."

-Bree

The really bad part is, he's pure book lecture, and the book sucks. Last semester, my prof would show random programs and rewrite bits while we watched, then answer questions about them--we didn't always understand it at the time, but I'd look later at my redline changes and be like, right. Of course! And got us used to actually seeing the structure as well as writing it, so we knew, in a vague way, what it was supposed to look like, and also, during class, could instantly ask questions about variations.

Here it's just--literally, staring at the text and googling until it clicks. And I swear the only reason the coordiate thing occurred to me was I was working on impossible graphs.

What will really suck is if they start babbling on about converting 2d arrays to 1d arrays and back. We had to do that a couple times, and it took forever for me to understand what the hell they were talking about. :p

I really think it's easiest to think of a 2d array as a list of arrays. The first number tells you which array to go to, and the second number tells you which "cell" of that array to look in. All this crap they do otherwise is just silly.

-Bree

ETA: Ooh, though I forgot something that I've noticed confuse people. In a 1d array you have two "values"...the key and the value stored within that location. Array[x] = y. In a 2d you have 3 values, key 1, key 2, and the value that they point to. Array[x][y] = z. Once you truly understand how that works, you can use arrays for all SORTS of tricky things. (I love to use them for counting instances of numbers. I'm a cheater. :D)

edited at: Date: 2008-03-24 06:44 pm (UTC)

My learning curve would increase exponentially.

Whose wouldn't?

Though I am slightly disturbed by the possibility that I will start thinking about 2d Arrays every time I see Karl Urban now... That wouldn't do at all. :D

-Bree

I love two dimensional arrays. Except for the part where I had a brain blank on what they were called the other day and I was correcting someone's code and I said, "That's not going to work because you have to pass in a..." and then I couldn't remember the word so I just made dual bracket symbols with my hands which probably looked really wrong, but apparently it got the point across as he said, "a multidimensional array?"

Hee! I hope one day to like them. When the scars heal.

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