Day 17 Writing to Files & Buffering
04 Feb 2020Today we boarded a train on a high speed rail. It was hard to determine if our instructor was just really excited to build up new desing principles or if there was just a lot to cover, but the speed of class was incredibly fast.
We learned how to use PrintWriter and BufferedWriter as well as what the difference is. BufferedWriter allows us to write incrementally and can handle errors in which we might try to write to a resource when it isn’t quite ready for our input. This was not a difficult concept, but it was new. What made today challenging is that we are moving from a procedural coding pattern in which we write most of our code in one file to a object oriented design pattern.
Of course, we have been leading up to this all along when we talked about encapsulation and started designing classes. But all of the sudden we are handling our application workflow in a main program, handling user input/output in a menu class, and then handling any logic in yet another class. It makes sense to seperate things out, but this particular design is not exactly intuitive which makes learning new things while also implementing them in the context of a new design pattern kind of difficult.
Brian said that he wants us to be familiar with the general design pattern before we ramp up to full study of the Model - View - Controller design in module two. I’m sure it’s better to be a little confused now vs. totally confused later.
Lightning Talks:
After class, a few students gave lightning talks. The topics were very future-focused and I enjoyed hearing about Bitcoin and the potential of Blockchain technology. The presentation on AI was also interesting because it brought up more philosophical questions than technical. We really don’t know where we are going with AI until we get there, but some philosophers will be proven right and some wrong.