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Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Humble pie in academia


On Monday, October 14, 2002, at 08:55 PM, Henry K van Eyken wrote:
> In recent weeks I have been finding out what old is. I registerd for 
> two computer courses at Vanier College: (1) UNIX through Linux and (2) 
> Programming In Java. The Java course I am taking together with my son 
> Marc, who already is familiar with  two other object-oriented 
> languages. Myself, I have programmed in BASIC and 15 years ago gave 
> several times a course in BASIC on pocket computers to college 
> teachers.    (01)

I wouldn't worry too much. I started programming when I was 9 and 
encountered OO when I was 20. It remained incomprehensible to me until 
recently, when I realised that nobody else knows what OO is either.    (02)

I have an entire bookshelf of books about OO and I've read all of them 
too. They all use different words to mean the same thing, and the same 
words to mean different things. Most of them focus on inheritance, 
which is only an optional part of OO.    (03)

Programming in a procedural language like Basic or C consists of 
telling the CPU what to do. Do this, do that, go here, go there. The 
programmer maintains a picture of what the machine is doing.    (04)

In an OO language, the CPU is going to go its own way, and you don't 
control program flow anymore. Any bit of your code is going to get 
called at any time out of the blue. Your job is to put the right bits 
of code in the right place with enough local information to work out 
what it's supposed to do.    (05)

I didn't really understand OO until I learned Ruby. It would be faster 
for you to spend a couple of days learning Ruby (read the online book 
'Programming Ruby') to understand what OO is about, then go back to 
Java where everything is hidden under layers of bizarre syntax and bad 
ideas.    (06)

--
   spwhite@chariot.net.au    (07)