Well, I don’t even know what to say right now. This task is not easy. Nothing is working. I don’t even mean the tests—making those pass is a task of it’s own, but for now, i can’t even get my server to connect—or rather get the specs to connect my server.
I’m also not sure how I feel about interfaces…. They seem like a good idea, but they make things pretty confusing and then I don’t know who I’m calling. Actually, okay I guess if I think about them like a core.clj file, it makes more sense. I’m calling the function through an object instead of from a dedicated namespace. You’d think that were the same thing, but it’s really not. And then Java has so many interfaces, and it’s yelling at me all the time for trying to make an instance of one, and when i go to implement it through something else, it wants me to add all these weird functions—ehr-hmm—methods to that class that I feel li shouldn’t really even need because there’s already an abstract one or interface with the precise name that I want that exists already!!!!! Argh!
Ok. Deep breaths. The pressure of the time limit (which I’m all for in theory) is getting to me also. The thing is that I’ve hardly started on passing any of the specs because I can’t ge the damn server to connect. And actually that’s not true. My server connects—at least when I stop it. It’s weird. I run it, and go to a browser and I get a big fat “PAGE NOT FOUND DUMBASS!!!!! YOU’RE SUCH AN IDIOT!!!!” (Ok, a little enthusiastic, but i swear it said that once!). But then when I stop my server from running, the browser suddenly shows everything i wanted it to show while it was running…. Weird right? Doesn’t make much sense to me. That’s got to be implying that I”m dong something right, but why when it when it stops?
On a plus note, I’ve gotten to learn how the internet works. It’s amazing that there is a method, or more precisely, a protocol for it all, and that protocols is implemented for pretty much every website you ever go to! I mean, I’ve typed in http before, but honestly, well, actually, I don’t know what i thought it was. I knew i needed it sometimes. I remember when i no longer had to type in “www.” anymore kind of like area codes back in the 90’s. But, no, I never knew what http was; just something you needed to type before the www to get to where you wanted to go. I did know that if the company you work for block a webpage, you could sometimes manually type in https instead of http, and you would get through, but they figured that out some time ago—but hey, give it a try. I still don’t know what https is. I’m sure I’ll find out, and I’ll probably even look it up after this week.
Okay, this one is getting a little wordy, so I’ll stop, but before I close, I will say that while this is the first time in this whole endeavor that I’ve felt a little discouraged, the exercise is good. I like (although you should read ‘enraged by’) the idea of not being able to use the internet as a resource for the answer or at least guidance to it. It’s so easy to rely on the internet to give you the answers that while you think you’ve figured something out on your own, you may not have.
I’m within the first generation that grew up with the internet, and in fact, I remember when the Net became a thing. I remember my father being really excited about it, and he took me to his very old apple, and brought up “KidsWeb” where I could color on the internet. He was impressed, and I had fun coloring and learning from him.
So while I can remember ‘before’ the internet, I’ve never really lived without it, and so this is the first time since probably before the internet and certainly since before I can remember that I’ve actually set out to do something without the aid of the internet. It’s a weird prehistoric feeling—I thought about getting out the encyclopedia a couple times, but then remembered that I don’t own any because, well, I typically rely on the internet.