CS Degree Day 35

Overview

Difficult day. The coin change problem gave me trouble, which surprised me. Dynamic programming is one of those things that seems comprehensible in the lecture and then dissolves when you have to construct the solution yourself. The mental model was not as solid as I believed. Spent two hours on a problem that should have taken forty minutes.

What I did today?

• Rewrote coin change problem without looking at hints - eventually solved it
• Lecture 9: Generators and iterators
• Lecture 10: Decorators

The decorator pattern clicked today. A decorator is a function that takes a function and returns a function. Wrapped around the original. It sounds recursive in a philosophical sense - a function about a function. I find that appealing.