I originally took this course hoping to gain some understanding of how computers and machines work (and I think I have – ish). But at the same time, ironically, instead of simply being amazed at all the cool stuff computers and programming allows us to do, I have come to appreciate the human qualities more. This might sound very random to many people and I don’t know how accurate it would be to describe programming as leaving the time-consuming processes to computers which make less mistakes than humans do. But my point is, getting a glimpse of how computers work allowed me to highlight the differences between humans and machines and came to appreciate the human capabilities I took for granted as well as technology.
When I tried to write a very simple code of less than 20 lines with the limited knowledge that I have, an error that I could not work out kept on occurring. I took multiple approaches to fix the code. First, I went over line by line and see what wasn’t working. Then, I opened a new screen and started writing from scratch. Finally, I got someone else to write the code for me and tried to replicate it. After failing to write 20 lines of code correctly, I realised that I had spelt ‘colour’ instead of ‘color’. The fact that computers which can carry out such complex processes without making a mistake, could not recognise ‘colour’ as ‘color’ made computers seem ridiculous to me but at the same time thought that humans are actually capable of a lot of things that don’t happen deservedly for machines.