Re: From extended Pascals to Ada 95 guide

[Ehud Lamm <mslamm@mscc.huji.ac.il>]

On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, John English wrote:

|Stefan Skoglund wrote:
|> 
|> note also that you need to imprint real early on a small taste
|> of OOP.
|
|Indeed.

I am really not sure about this.
Sometimes good intentions lead to bad results... Indeed, exposure to OO
concepts is important, however in my experiense those who learned Java
first have huge problems with simple imperative notions like loops and
structured programing (i.e., breaking code into routines).
I find that, when taught well, most students with Pascal/C background
learn the OOP approach rather easily (Note: I am not talking about
becoming experts in patterns, frameworks or the more inticate uses of
inheritance). 
However, it is quite uncommon to tell students who learned Java as a first
language, that they have to take a course on "structured programming" -
only so that they relearn about loops and such,.
Since this is not done, they usually stay, almost, programming
illiterate. 


Who knows? Maybe the best approach will be to teach a functinal/object
language first... :-)

Ehud Lamm mslamm@mscc.huji.ac.il
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ehudlamm <== My home on the web 
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