I’m excited to share my #WillHuntingChallenge has begun! I’ve started reading the textbook and watched the first lecture video on OpenCourseWare for the Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python course.

My initial reaction is surprise at how little attention this course gives to how computers work, Turing Machines, and the Church Turing Thesis. Looking ahead in the textbook, I’m also not seeing much on programming paradigms. When I took Intro to Computer Science in college, we studied logic gates, we spent weeks learning to use a Turing Machine simulator, and we learned about several programming paradigms, writing pseudocode to get a feel for how these paradigms worked and their relative strengths and weaknesses. This context was extremely helpful when I later learned to code, because I understood the why behind the how.

Don’t get me wrong; the MIT course will get into functional and object-oriented programming, but there’s nothing in the textbook about paradigms in general or other specific paradigms. On the other hand, the MIT course has students writing code in the very first lecture. And as I look ahead in the textbook, I see a lot of content related to statistics, big data, and machine learning. Aside from some of the statistics content, I don’t have much prior knowledge of those topics, so I’m looking forward to diving in.

As a side-note, these updates will be less frequent going forward. I’ll post as I reach milestones (such as “completing” a course), learn new skills, or come across information I find fascinating, but not after every lecture video or textbook chapter. And if anyone reading this post is doing a Will Hunting Challenge of your own, I hope you’re learning a lot, and drop me a message if you want to connect.