First Day Of CS Classes

Today was the first day of my 'academic' renewal. In 1994, I had gotten a bachelor's in Physics w/Astrophysics option from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology... and had left the school very burnt out and not wanting to ever see a University again... after 13 years... the school bug has bitten again, and I have decided to venture back into Academia with the long term goal of getting a PhD in Computer Science or similar field.

However, a long time has passed since my CS courses (Pascal and Fortran are no longer used as much in classes... and the assembly courses no longer use the M68k for their target CPU). To address that problem, I decided to start from 'scratch' again by taking CS259, a course that combines the first two UNM CS courses into one firehose class. I got to school early this morning... found the classroom on time... and got caught up with how people program in the 21st century by writing a 'Goodbye dear world' program using Java and Eclipse. I will say that I liked my professor's style... no PowerPoint presentation as others use.. no just good old fashioned lecture-mode in Emacs. This week is basically the first chapter of Arnold, Gosling, and Holmes , 'The Java Programming Language'. and some esoterical questions about the idioms of programming in Java these days.