Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash
Due to some unexpected illness Days 20 & 21 were rest days and today was an easy day — no coding, just reading. I hope everyone remembers to work hard toward their goal, but also listen to what their body needs. Here’s my update for Day 22! Happy coding!
Today’s Progress:
Today I read through Chapter 5 ‘Higher-Order Functions’ of Eloquent JavaScript Marijn Haverbeke. This chapter focused on using abstraction to write simpler, easy-to-read programs/scripts. Below are my notes from today’s reading.
Quotes & Key Ideas:
- “‘There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.’ — C.A.R. Hoare, 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture”
- “Functions that operate on other functions, either by taking them as arguments or by returning them, are called higher-order functions. … Higher-order functions allow us to abstract over actions, not just values.”
- “The
map method transforms an array by applying a function to all of its elements and building a new array from the returned values. The new array will have the same length as the input array, but its content will have been mapped to a new form by the function."
- “Another common thing to do with arrays is to compute a single value from them.” When we compute a single value (like finding the sum, or the element with the most characters) we are “reducing” (or folding) the array.
- “Higher-order functions start to shine when you need to compose operations
- It’s not enough to just write eloquent or simple, easy-to-read scripts. It’s also important to be strategic about what those scripts are going to be used for/on. In other words, what are the actual computations the computer will do and how much energy/time will it consume to do so.
- “The
some method is another higher-order function. It takes a test function and tells you whether that function returns true for any of the elements in the array."
- “If you have a character (which will be a string of one or two code units), you can use
codePointAt(0) to get its code."
Thoughts:
It’s been a long week. Long story short, I’ve got a back/neck ache due to a poor ergonomic desk setup at work (still troubleshooting that) and I had some gastro-intestinal issues that required a day of rest. As such, I haven’t got a lot of actually coding done lately. The past two days were Rest Days and today I only read through a chapter of Eloquent JavaScript.
However, I am enjoying reading through this book. Combined with the exercises I’ve been doing on freeCodeCamp I’m finding it helpful to reinforce the concepts and see things explained in a different way.
Admittedly, I am bit sad about not getting to work on sitting down at the desk and coding, but my health has to take a priority. I’m still not quite feeling 100%, but hopefully tomorrow I’ll be rested and ready to get back at it.
You can read my full #100DaysOfCode journey on GitHub.
