Now, when I build a system, in whatever language, for whichever specifications, I strive to do that. I try to keep my classes lean and clean, write the unit tests, refine the APIs etc. However, I've found that when you use programming as a learning aid for children, they simply don't care. I'm aware of the literature you've mentioned. In fact, "Epistemological Pluralism" is quite an outlier in the field: most people think there's a "right" and a "wrong" way to do software. But even that paper doesn't go as far as denouncing the idea of modularity. It just says that some programmers like their modules in a different flavour.
What I find (and, fro personal communications, I think others do as well), is that kids tend to write task-specific "throw away" code. They'll prefer to re-write a tool even when an implementation they themselves created is just under their hand.
My instinctive reaction, as a software engineer and computer scientist, was to "show them the light" - and lead them towards modular programming. I am now at a point of taking a step back, and trying to understand "why?" before I think about "how to change". My current working assumption is that children are good managers of their own learning, and if they insist on doing something in a particular way, there's a reason. By the way, when I started thinking about this issue, I noticed that a lot of the code I write when I'm "off task", i.e., not working on a product but fooling around in one way or another - is extremely specific, unmodular and not reusable.
- Yishay
Michael Toomim wrote:
Derek M Jones wrote:
People tend to use the term modularity in one of two ways.
1) a function (or procedure, subroutine, etc) is a module,
2) a source file (or package, etc) is a module.
Duplicate code can be removed to a single function in the same source file.
Thanks, I see that my definition of modularity was probably different than most. Yishay, which definition are you interested in?
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