Week 4

This was another two day week for this class thanks to icy roads, but we still covered lots of ground. We read about pair programming, discussed the Netflix rating project a bit more, and learned some cool Python tricks.

The articles Downing assigned regarding pair programming were both evangelical. Before reading the papers, I thought that two developers each focusing on separate tasks would surely get more done than when they focus on one task together. My reasoning was that they are able to work concurrently, and while the speed at which they work individually may not match that of two people working on one thing, the pair programmers are on one thread. After reading the articles, I am a bit conflicted and won’t count pair programming out as perhaps being more productive. One of the two articles had evidence to back up his claims of productivity increases, which helped his cause; however, getting meaningful data is difficult in this situation.

The pair programming papers coincided nicely with the Netflix project because we were encouraged to work in pairs for this assignment. At first I was just going to go solo because partnering with randoms can often lead to headache, but I decided to go for it anyways because we get bonus points for having a partner. Probably at worst I’d have to do the whole project myself, which is what I’d have to do without a partner. This weekend we met twice at a coffee shop for a few hours each time and got the bulk of the project done. Not bad.

As an intro to Python functional components such as map and lambda, we implemented a function in various ways that computes the root mean square of two iterables. We also looked at generators and list comprehensions, although I’m not sure if those are considered to be “functional programming.” In the end we converted a function that was 6 or 7 lines long down to an elegant, two line solution. I’ve used list comprehensions a lot, but haven’t really used generators much. I now hope to start spotting situations in which they are applicable more often.

I’ve always been curious about functional programming, and it looks like we’ll touch on it a bit more. I’m looking forward to that and to finishing up this Netflix project. Gotta get that RMSE down below 1.