Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!princeton!allegra!ulysses!mhuxt!ihnp4!gargoyle.uchicago.edu!sphinx!goer From: goer@sphinx.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Teaching object-oriented paradigm to beginners? Message-ID: <1048@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> Date: Tue, 13-Jan-87 02:22:01 EST Article-I.D.: sphinx.1048 Posted: Tue Jan 13 02:22:01 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 14-Jan-87 22:46:02 EST References: <4000001@nucsrl.UUCP> <3288@milano.UUCP> <147@m10ux.UUCP> Reply-To: goer@sphinx.UUCP (Richard L. Goerwitz III) Organization: Univ. of Chicago Computation Center Lines: 34 I've been reading the discussion about novice programmers and o-o languages for a day or two now. One thing that stikes me is that no one is discussing things like concrete applications. Surely computer design, architecture, programming, and what not are all interesting in and of themselves. But most people who are learning to program have some definite goal in mind - some problem they hope to solve by programming. People who are only cutting code for a living obviously do not fit into this mold. Nor do theorists of various stripes. Folks like me who are primarily involved in some other discipline, and who see programming skills merely as a useful adjunct, need to concentrate on a language (or group of languages) that will answer their immediate needs. We probably won't have the time or inclination to learn several languages extremely well, so a miss on the first try could be fatal (figure that one out :-)). What I'm leading up to is, in actuality, a question. I myself am a begin- ning programmer. My experience has been with 8088 assembler and with BASIC. No, my mind has not been bent too much by the latter of these, since the Micro- soft Assembler for the IBM PC is structured too much like Pascal. My inter- est is, however, not in low-level programming. I just thought I ought to get familiar with computer hardware so that freaky glitches and bugs didn't give me the chills. What I really want to accomplish by programming is to handle strings - strings of characters that make up graphic representations of natural languag- es. I need to be able to search, store, retrieve, and manipulate text in biz- arre ways. And I want to do so with a language that is not idiosyncratic (i.e. it will be around ten years from now, with roughly the same syntax, on a reason ably large number of machines). What does that leave me with? "Good program- ming practices" are nice, but I'd be quite willing to sacrifice the theory of good programs to the actual capacity for getting a program that gets the job done written. I mean, I'd hate to waste a year learning a language that's great pedagogically, and find after everything that this language really isn't designed to accomplish my aims in a very elegant fashion! -Richard Goerwitz