To preface this post I would like to say that this is the last blog post I will be writing for a little bit. I hope to return to this blog with a new outlook on the process of writing blogs and hopefully with more freedom in what I can post, the frequency and quality of posts will increase. In this post I have decided to do some research on REST in order to fully understand it so that going forth in my career I have a firm grasp on REST. Before reading this extensive article on bbvaopen4u.com about REST pretty much all I knew is that REST deals with http requests and http stuff.

First thing I learned when reading the post was that REST is more of a blanket term for any interface between systems that allows for the transfer and editing of data over multiple formats. This idea is so important because it vastly increases the scalability and functionality of products being created. It has become the standard in creating web applications and is used by most of the top sites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. The writer then goes into detail about the features that make REST special and why we all love it. A great feature of rest is the fact that everything is manipulated through the URL, keeping applications very uniform in how they access objects. They also talk about how it is a layered system which helps organize large applications. They then go into the benefits of using REST. Using REST separates the clients and the server which allows for scalability and ease of migration to other platforms. REST is also always independent of type of language being used which also increases options for migration and ease of development.

I enjoyed this read and while I feel as though it could have delved a little deeper into what REST is it was a quick easy read that helped me understand REST. Using REST in our assignments and project I had been emulating what I had seen without truly understanding what REST was. If you are like me and was having trouble grasping the concept of REST I would recommend reading this post.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Dummies for Programming by John Pacheco and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I consider myself a predominantly creative person as opposed to someone who thinks in a very mathematical and literal way. Most people would probably argue that I should be going to school for something along the lines of art or music but I’d argue that programming requires the same amount of creative prowess as both of those majors.

A user on DevDungeon wrote a post about this topic called Similarities Between Music and Programming. This article goes into detail about how the learning process in both music and programming is very similar. They talk about how most people feel like music and programming similarly are things that you are born with a natural gift for and can be difficult to learn. With music there is very much a mathematical science behind the music which can almost always be explained using the concepts learned through music theory. In music there are very many ways to get a similar result and all musicians will think of songs and have vastly different musical ideas. The same could be said for programmers. Many programmers can come up with vastly different solutions to the same problem based on how their brain solves the problem at hand. They also talk about how there is a hypothetical “stage fright” that occurs when just starting out in both fields. New musicians and programmers usually don’t want to share their work because it is very much an extension of yourself and if it is not up to your own standards it is hard to want to share what you’ve made. You can think of collaborating on a program with others as a band of sorts. If all members of the band aren’t on the same page then the outcome will most likely have many issues. They then go on to talk about how music and programming are very hands on and from day one should be taught in a hands on way.

I agree with almost everything said in this post. It was a very enlightening read because I have always taking a liking to the creative arts and seeing the similarities now it makes sense as to why I enjoy programming so much as well. I’d argue that programmers should learn music composition as it would help with the fundamentals of problem solving that are essential for programmers.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Dummies for Programming by John Pacheco and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the minds at Rice University comes a very interesting application for deep-learning AI. Bayou is an AI that, with a very small list of keywords, can produce usable blocks of code. It does this by scanning github and learning from all of the open source code on there. What does this mean for all of us computer scientists? This means that an era where AI may be able to aid us in completion of programs is on the way. For a long time this concept has been played with but never in such an efficient manner as Bayou. With other AI programmers sometimes the parameters you would have to enter to get a usable end product would surpass the program itself in length and complexity. While my title is very clickbaity I can guarantee that our jobs are safe for a very long time. This technology is only in infancy and for large programs that interact with many APIs and databases and such the need for a human to parse what needs to be written is still very essential. Bayou is more of a proof of concept that if built out even further can be very useful for speeding up the programming process.

In the post Turning deep-learning AI loose on software development, Jade Boyd makes many fair points about the ethics of Bayou. As programmers being so connected to the internet constantly has made it almost impossible to write programs from scratch. At any slight hitch we are able to search the internet and find someone else’s solution to a problem that we are facing. This point really proves that Bayou shouldn’t be seen as “cheating” rather that it is yet another tool that can give us examples of ways to solve specific problems that we maybe would have otherwise not given thought to.

I believe that applications such as Bayou are a step in the right direction. If we can get AI to write all of the simple parts of programs it would guarantee less simple errors and can also unify the format of the program. Programs can get extremely complex and Bayou wouldn’t replace us rather aid in saving us time and therefore money in the programming process.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Dummies for Programming by John Pacheco and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.