My First Impression of Unity

Katherine Piniol — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 21:19:05 +0000

This past week, I attended the first meeting for one of the clubs in my college campus. It's called Game Dev, one of the Special Interest Groups (SIG) in ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). Along with introductions, they started to expose us to Unity.

When first opening Unity, this is what shows:

Without them having to say anything, it was fairly straight forward. I knew what the projects and the learn tab meant. However, opening up and creating a new project is what really caught me off guard.

I didn't have any previous experience with any game engine so I was extremely overwhelmed. I didn't know what any of it meant or how any of it worked. The Game Dev president had guided us through what each section meant and started to walk us through and help out with the Roll-a-Ball learning project.

I was still unsure how to work it but as we went through the first steps, the moment we placed a sphere and added physics to it, I was amazed. I immediately wanted to learn more and start working with Unity. I, however, don't know C#, I've had experience with C and C++, but not C#.

This brief experience with Unity has made me want to start learning Unity and C# in my free time instead of Python. While I'd like to learn both Python and C#, I have a college course where I'm learning LISP, and juggling both LISP and Python is already a little difficult, not to mention the lack of free time I have. But I look forward to learning Unity and making a game with it.

My First Month Learning Python

Katherine Piniol — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 01:25:08 +0000

Using a Udemy Course, The Modern Python 3 Bootcamp by Colt Steele, I started to learn Python in my free time. Python is not my first programming language, I have some previous experience with Java, C, C++, and JavaScript. Through college courses, I learned the previously stated programming languages, while also learning about some foundational topics.

My first impression of Python was that it was noticeably different from both Java and C.

The syntax was not something I was used to. While I'm used to coding standards – keeping everything organized and easy to read – Python requires you to keep track of tabs in place of the usual semi-colons like in other languages.

With things like for-loops and while-loops, in Java and C, the curly brackets is the one the holds everything in place. Instead, in Python, a colon introduces you to its contents. Here's an example of what I mean.

Java

int sum = 0;
for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    sum += i;
}

Python

for i in range(10):
    sum += i

Even with a few lines of code, there are a lot of differences.

The way variables are defined are also different. In Java and C, you have to explicitly state what kind of variable it is, unlike Python, where it's more like JavaScript., the type of variable isn't explicitly stated and can change depending on how you set its value.

There's also list and dictionary comprehensions, something Java doesn't have. It's another way to iterate through lists or dictionaries.

So far, while different from what I am used to, Python is something that I am able to quickly get used to.

The Udemy course that I follow goes into depth, giving exercises about each new topic it introduces. After following the course through completion, I plan to take another course about AI in Python, to supplement the college course and independent research I have already done.

Forem: Katherine Piniol

My First Impression of Unity

My First Month Learning Python