IST Portfolio
SDD
Marius van Jaarsveldt
2014

Personal Profile

Who am I and what do I enjoy doing?

My name is Marius van Jaarsveldt, I am a 15 year old day boy at joeys. I enjoy playing video games, walking my dog, spending time with friends, taking photo’s, basketball and rugby.

What do I hope to do when I leave school?

When I leave school I hope to find a job that I enjoy, I don’t want to be behind a desk necessarily but a job in IST would be an exception. I hope to enjoy life to the fullest and to be happy.

What do I think of the Software Design Topic?

The software design topic has been both challenging and enjoyable for me. Things that I liked the most was creating my first game (pong) and creating the spritz reader. Although some parts of this topic have been very challenging it was a great feeling having completed one of the tasks.

Table of Contents

Coding Languages
An imperative language uses a sequence of statements to determine how to reach a certain goal. These statements are said to change the state of the program as each one is executed in turn.

In functional programming, programs are executed by evaluating expressions, in contrast with imperative programming where programs are composed of statements, which change global state when executed. Functional programming typically avoids using mutable state.

Logic programming languages, of which PROLOG (programming in logic) is the best known, state a program as a set of logical relations

Procedural programming is a type of programming where a program consists of a procedure, or routine, of a number of instructions, which must be followed in order.

Event Driven Programming is a computer-programming paradigm. Events are the actions that are performed by the user during the application usage. If a user clicks a mouse button on any object then the click event occurs. If a user moves the mouse then the mouse move event occurs.

A declarative language describes what it wants to accomplish rather than focusing on how to achieve its goal. Writing a declarative program is not about specifying a sequence of statements to run one after another to create an application, but to write declarative statements that show a relationship between each other.

Object-oriented programming refers to a programming paradigm using 'objects' – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions to design applications and computer programs.

Variables

A variable is a symbolic name for (or reference to) information. The variable's name represents what information the variable contains. They are called variables because the represented information can change but the operations on the variable remain the same.

It is important to declare variables so that we can tell the computer which data type each variable holds we declare variables before we use them. This sets aside the correct space in the memory of the computer in preparation for holding the variables values. However, not all programming languages enforce this

GUI Elements

What is a GUI?
It is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons, (buttons, menus, etc.). The whole purpose of the GUI was to create more visual appeal. Each icon may represent something different.

Who invented/created the idea of the GUI?
Apple released the first GUI for a desktop computer in the early 1980’s, but was invented by researchers at the Stanford Research Institute, led by Douglas Englebart. They created text-based hyperlinks to be manipulated with a mouse for the On-Line System (NLS).

What impact did the GUI have on the use of computers?
Computers today, the GUI has made computers in general more visually pleasing. It modernized the computer user interface and it attracts a much larger audience. Files, websites and applications, are just a few of the things