Sisyphus

31 Aug 2017

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The Myth

Mythology has always been a subject that I was fascinated in. Stories of gods, heroes, and villians in mystical settings that defy logic. The first stories of myths that I read were Greek mythology. In many myths involving the underworld, there is usually a small bit about a man rolling a stone up a hill, named Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a famous person in Greek mythology. He was a crafty king, who was devious enough to outwit gods, but Zeus condemned him to an eternal punishment to the underworld. He was forced to push an enormous boulder up to the very top of a steep hill only to have the boulder roll back down to hit him and have him roll the boulder back up again.

Connection

In some ways, I feel understanding of the Sisyphus when I am coding. When I write lines and lines of code only to find out there is a problem, it feels like the boulder has fallen down and I have to push it back up again. Especially when I spend a long time just staring at my code, it indeed does feel like I’m in the underworld. For Sisyphus, pushing the boulder is futile task because the boulder will fall, but for me, its important because when the boulder reaches the top, I feel accomplished at all the hard work I did. Although, it feels like the boulder has rolled back down when I have to create a new program, like Sisyphus, I will still continue to push that boulder towards the top of the hill.

Choice

Computer science has always been interesting to me because I can build from scratch many types of things. Creating programs is full of so many possibilities, just like mythology, anything could happen. If I wanted to, I could create my own mythological world where everything defies logic. I don’t have much experience outside of class with creating programs and software, but I would like to learn more coding languages and the possibilities that I could do with them. So far I’ve only learned about various coding languages and I haven’t touched upon other topics that I would like to learn; for example, artificial intelligence. I want to be able to create programs based off of random thoughts in my head, but for now, I just want to obtain as much information I can get about software enginerring.