Making Software!

17 Dec 2021

There is so much information that I was given in ics 314 because there is so much different things we cover and try out. It was very interesting because instead of just talking about some of the features we got to use most of it in our weekly practice. Functional programming was a very important thing that I learned because it gave us another way to write code for other languages and I actually found that this style of coding was pretty fast compared to others. Functional programming was where we use functions in functions to get a value to return and I found that very cool to use and it made it look a lot simpler than if you were to write it in a language such as C. In some cases it would be cut down from a multiple line structure to a single line of code and I found out just how much time I could be saving. The cool developement environments that we were introduced to was also a very interesting thing because we could also use browser versions such as jsFiddle. The development environments are the places where you can write code and get convenient tools to fix parts of code that may be wrong. This was touched upon when we started to use intelliJ which had an error checker called eslint. It shows errors and will highlight them in red and will even give an option to what it thinks the solution is. It kept my code bug free for the most part other than logic errors on my side. It also knows about coding standards and helped to fix them as well. Coding standards are made to keep the code looking uniform so it can be easily read by others. After working on a group project with others I found it very good for all our code to have the same look so I would know what everyone was trying to do and didn’t get me confused in different looking code. During the end of the course we talked about Ethics in Software engineering and saw just how complicated it could be because nothing is very set in stone. There are many rules in coding, for example that it must not perform harm to others. But this can be gone around because the publishers can say that it is not specifically targeting anyone, the internet is just the internet. This was shown in the charges against Facebook and they were able to get out of it relatively easily becuase they brought up the point that the damage done was not targeting users. The ethics are just ethics in the end of the day, they are not set laws that we have to abide by which leads to the problem of people abusing applications. Ethics is something that I think the internet should use more often because the internet can be a safe place but people choose not to do so.