Re: teaching a child - console or GUI

From: Bruce Roberts (ber_at_bounceitattcanada.xnet)
Date: 07/26/04 

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 09:51:11 -0400

"Marco van de Voort" <marcov@stack.nl> wrote in message
news:slrncg7jp6.1tb4.marcov@toad.stack.nl...

> > I don't agree. If someone suggested that Medieval Dutch be the first
> > language taught to your children would you not consider that backwards.
>
> That's not a proper comparison.

It is a reasonable comparison. Programming languages, for all that they are
contrived, evolve. Someone who only knows Delphi could read a circa 1972
Pascal program and come to understand it. A programmer in the 1970's viewing
a Delphi program would immediately recognize it as being written in a Pascal
dialect. Although they would have tremendous difficulty extracting meaning.
Delphi is Pascal with a far richer vocabulary and some alteration of
semantics.

> The proper comparison would be to talk to a baby like you do to an adult.
It
> won't work. There is a reason for baby talk.

No. This is a very poor comparison. When talking to children one may use a
more limited vocabulary, but one still communicates using modern, but often
simplified, syntax and semantics. In Delphi terms one might well include
classes in the vocabulary but leave out the intricacies of interfaces.

> The choice for non-OOP has nnothing to do with "historical". It is a
> didactic choice.

And for that reason I believe it is very wrong. One's first language has a
huge influence on how one thinks. Every subsequent language is initially
learned through a filter of the first. (If you have any doubts on this, just
browse through the ng - its not too difficult to pick out posters who first
learned a block structured language like Pascal or ALGOL first from those
whose first programming language was less structured.) When I had to
transition from procedural to OOP style programming I had to make
significant adjustments in how I approached and styled solutions. I have to
say that it was not an easy transition. Although this was probably
exacerbated by also learning to write for gui. OOP has procedural elements
so transitioning back to pure procedural is actually much simpler - although
why one would want to do this is beyond me.

OOP in and of itself does not hide anything about the system from the
programmer. It is simply another way of modeling solutions.

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