Cody Codes Code

In this week's material, we expanded on what we started previously about arrays, classes, and inheritance, and put it together to create a program that simulates a deck of 52 standard playing cards and then performs basic card operations such as shuffling a deck and dealing it to "players", which are classified as Hand objects (objects that store Card objects in internal arrays). I haven't gotten this program any kind of approval or convinced some sort of online gambling site to use it for some of the backend they use to run their casino games, but I'll keep all of you readers of this lovely blog once I do, and how much money I make (or lose) off it. Disclaimer: I am not promoting or endorsing gambling with your assets. Speaking of arrays, the largest multi-dimensional array I've ever used was a 10 x 10 array that an old professor of mine came up with for a simulated "Battleship" program in another class I took early in my computer science...

This week involved learning about object-oriented programming, and writing a fun casino slot machine simulator for the weekly assignment.  I thought the assignment was a good exercise in working with classes and objects, although personally if I had the freedom to completely change method signatures and control flow logic as I pleased I probably would've come up with a drastically different solution. Additionally, the software tester in me wrote a couple of unit tests for my own personal amusement that performed 20 - 40 spins randomly, along with random inputs of -10 to 100 as inputs. The unit tests worked fine as well as the manual inputs I used to test the program as well. Object-oriented programming is great, but I have actually more experience working in languages that aren't based on object-oriented programming. My first programming language and class was C, and since then I've taken multiple classes in that language itself. I've written several basic programs ...

This week was the first week of class, and as such, I did a bunch of usual first week of class stuff, which included setting up (more like dusting off and modifying!) my Java development environment and ensuring I was following the style guide while doing the assignment. Overall, it was a nice warm up to getting back into writing Java programs as I haven't done so in several months when I was busy working with Python. Additionally, the discussion I participated in about open source software and the issue of security was an interesting topic to read and write about.  Speaking of development environment, I have used both Eclipse and IntelliJ before, and I used to prefer Eclipse over IntelliJ in the latter's earlier versions but now I prefer IntelliJ for several personal reasons. I find myself more comfortable using it in its current state, and knowing IntelliJ is definitely helpful when doing Android programming as Android Studio is largely based off IntelliJ. I consider m...