OpenMusings

So I’m currently plugging away at TMA04 for M257. There’s something unique about programming questions that can be eternally infuriating – it’s quite possible to bang away at a question, or portion of one, for hours on end without making any progress before you get that little “ding!” of inspiration that lets you finish the task in 5 minutes.

Let’s take, for example, Q3(c). I started that at around 7pm on Tuesday evening. At 1am I finally gave up and went to bed – and had code fragments floating through my head, with one half on my brain still trying to puzzle out the question while the other tried desperately to get to sleep. Work on Wednesday involved several piles of scrap paper on the desk with little Java snippets scribbled down to try later. The solution finally arrived in my head, with an almost-audible “hallelujah!”, at around 8pm Wednesday evening. It’s now coded, screenshotted and safely in the solution document – but I’m fairly certain all that aggravation should be worth more than 19 marks.

Not the end of the story, sadly, as Q3(e) is now giving me the same problems. And that’s only worth 12 marks. Aargh.

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