Linux and DOTA in C

Recently, I opened my computer, entered Linux, and started writing C code with the vi editor. I was halfway through when my classmate called me to play DOTA… Then, I restarted, entered XP, and opened World of Warcraft.

Before I knew it, exams were approaching again, and time had passed so quickly. This semester seemed to have flown by, and it was already coming to an end. Several elective courses were about to conclude, and as a result, I had a growing number of papers to write. If I wasn’t careful, the total number would soon reach double digits. So, I had to find a dark and windy night to open Word and link together the fragmented content from several web pages using my ingenious transitional phrases. I pieced together a few paragraphs, modified the original text’s pronouns, and thus gave birth to a bizarre article that could move heaven and earth. Of course, the most frequent thing I did during this process was check the word count. I finally managed to cobble something together, although I didn’t even want to read it myself.

When writing C code, I discovered that I really couldn’t understand the computer’s thought process. At first, I tried to think through the computer’s operations step by step before writing the code. However, as the problems became more difficult, I started to rely on intuition. This led to a plethora of errors when compiling with GCC. I spent about 10 times more time debugging than writing the program. If I was lucky, I could fix the errors; otherwise, I had to start from scratch. Eventually, I felt exhausted when dealing with arrays and pointers, and I realized my limitations when faced with recursion.

Lately, I’ve been playing DOTA in moderation, but sometimes I still can’t resist. I’ve played a few more games, and now I feel that playing DOTA is a huge waste of time.

In the Introduction to Measurement and Control course, the teacher passionately talked about the future of this major, saying that we would either soar like a phoenix or end up as a flop. Haha, I love this major.

It’s been a while since I last wrote. I’ll post a few of my papers in the next few days as a memento of my Ctrl+C Ctrl+V achievements.

Good luck to all the students taking the college entrance exams!