TITLE: How Might A Program Help Me Solve This Problem?
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 28, 2020 11:04 AM
DESC: bew
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BODY:

<em>Note: The following comes from the bottom of my previous post.
It gets buried there beneath a lot of code and thinking out loud,
but it's a message that stands on its own</em>.

~~~~~

 I demo'ed a variation of
<a href="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2020-11.html#e2020-11-25T12_15_41.htm">
   my database-briven passphrase generator</a>
 to my students as we closed the course last week.  It let me wrap up
 my time with them by reminding them that they are developing skills
 that can change how they see every problem they encounter in the
 future.

 Knowing how to write programs gives you a new power.  Whenever you
 encounter a problem, you can ask yourself, "How might a program help
 me solve this?"

 The same is true for many more specialized CS skills.  People who
 know how to create a language and implement an interpreter can ask
 themselves, "How might a language help me solve this problem?"
 That's one of the outcomes, I hope, of our course in programming
 languages.

 The same is true for databases, too.  Whenever you encounter a
 problem, you can ask yourself, "Can a database help me solve this?"

 Computer science students can use the tools they learn each semester
 to represent and interpret information.  That's a power they can use
 to solve many problems.  It's easy to lose sight of that fact during
 a busy semester and worth reflecting on in calmer moments.
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