State of Perpetual Errors
20 Oct 2016
State of Perpetual Errors
When I had first started my meteor adventure, I was excited to be learning a new language, and as I stated in my other essay, I was elated to be able to add a new language to my programming arsenal. However, my happiness did not last long, as I was plagued by constant errors and the experience was not very enjoyable. I stayed up for days trying to fix the problems, even going as far as dual booting Ubuntu onto my laptop just to try and get it to work, but to no avail. The experience can best be described as getting hit on the head with “a small body of matter from outer space that enters the earth’s atmosphere, becoming incandescent as a result of friction and appearing as a streak of light” –(Johnson 2016). And unfortunately, due to the problems, I was not fully able to do the assignments and understand the syntax through doing it myself, and I just tried my best to learn through the screencasts. And with that said, this has to be the most difficult, unique, and problematic language I had ever tried to learn yet, so props to you, Meteor.
Death by Meteor… kind of
I thought all of the different importing statements were a little confusing at the start. When I was attempting to do the To-Do List practice. Just forgetting one period, or adding one more for whatever reason, made a huge problem and I was unable to import some files and after a while of searching on google, I was kind of able to figure it out why.
Just this little difference cause my whole program to crash!
I also felt like the syntax of functions were weirdly written, although they were not that hard to understand compared to regular java syntax that I’m normally used to. Load times were a bit of a problem as well but did not really make it any more difficult to understand. I thought it was cool to learn and use the command line prompt. I had never really used it before so I enjoyed being able to learn about it and be able to implement it for the use of a project. It was definitely the easiest thing to learn even though it wasn’t even Meteor. I think that Meteor has a lot of potential for software engineers or people looking to create websites and things of that nature. It seems the potential is astronomical and there are buttons and databases and a whole bunch of cool new things that I learned. I also liked the use of the flow router, making it easier to navigate back to the home page and it felt like the site that we were to create could work and actually be used by other people. I would like to do things like that in the future and being able to catch my first glimpses of it now was awesome. When it comes to the application architecture of Meteor, it was definitely a bit confusing, as I had no prior experience in the realms of client-server applications. However, learning about it was interesting, I was a bit confused about the server moving around because I guess I don’t really understand much about that field yet.
Conclusion
Conclusively, this is only the beginning of the Meteor expedition and I’m already having a hard time trying to get through all of the errors. It’s as if I’m living in a state of perpetual errors where nothing I can do will fix them. However; it’s not stopping me from trying to catch up and learn about it with the best of my abilities. Meteor has a learning curve that I have not fully surmounted yet, and although it is difficult there are some cool aspects to it. I definitely believe that Meteor is an interesting as well as useful application that I hope to be able to master and utilize to create cool applications and or websites in the future that people may actually be able to use in their daily lives.
