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From: billw@navajo.STANFORD.EDU (William E. Westfield)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Teaching object-oriented paradigm to beginners?
Message-ID: <1285@navajo.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Sun, 11-Jan-87 01:06:54 EST
Article-I.D.: navajo.1285
Posted: Sun Jan 11 01:06:54 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 13-Jan-87 01:06:13 EST
References: <4000001@nucsrl.UUCP> <746@drivax.UUCP>
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 15
Summary: I don't understand...

One problem with languages that directly implment high level
abstractions is that they require the user to understand
high level abstractions too.  MACSYMA is a wonderful system
for doing calculus, for exmaple, but it won't help someone
who doesn't know calculus find the area under a curve.
Indeed, they would probably be better off knowing basic,
and having a picture with rectangles and what not.

In a similar way, object oriented programming seems to
take for granted a lot of things that are just as meaningless
to beginning CS types as TDZA 1,1 (inheritance of properties?
Properties? local storage ? temporary variables? (all from
the first 50 pages of smalltalk-80...))

BillW