Sometimes when I program, it flows well and I seem to get everything.  Other times, I feel like nothing makes sense, and then it all cascades downhill into a swampy, sticky mess.  Then it seems that more and more of the problem is not working, and it becomes more convoluted, and my frustration increases.  

I just spent my morning allotment of programming time on one problem.  When I first started I thought the final bits were sitting right in front of me, and that I would be able to complete it in no time.  Then as time wore on it became more complicated, I started to rewrite my code over and over.  By the end of it, after asking for help multiple times, I felt like I was just banging my head against a wall, and I was almost ready to cry.  Why wasn’t I understanding it?  What wasn’t clicking?  

This problem that I’m talking about, that is causing me so much pain and anguish, is the culmination of the recent problem set I’ve been working on.  This particular problem is using a part of coding I haven’t yet used before, and it’s proving to be a challenge.  This part is called binary search.  Anyways, when I went to the wiki it didn’t help that the main example I looked at was written in Pascal (different programming language) which I tried to interpret.  That didn’t work out so well.  That same example was also written to be used against an array, which was also not helpful.  

I was hoping to finish that piece of code, and write up my final blog entries for the problem set today.  Suffice it to say I’m still not finished.  I’m fairly frustrated at the moment, but I decided to take some time before I dive back in.  I think I might go on a bike ride to let the stress fizzle away.