In a message of Sun, 12 Jun 2005 22:08:50 PDT, "Kirby Urner" writes:
>OO really is a different world. I think it still makes sense to teach the >subject historically, even though we *can* start with objects at the same >time. In other words, have students relive some of the trauma of moving >from the procedural paradigm to the object oriented one -- not to >traumatize, but to give the flavor of what "paradigm" even means (including >that switching between them may be difficult). This may make sense for people who already know procedureal programming, but I don't think that it is a good idea for the rest of the world. I think that you need to learn about exception handling _early_ ... say right after you learn how to write a loop, and unit testing, and test driven design from the moment you get out of the 'how to play with the interpreter' stage. There isn't a lot of use in teaching people the procedural necessity of doing a huge amount of data validation, and how to deal with the 'cannot happen' of malformed data. It makes for really ugly code -- where it is close to impossible to find out what the code is supposed to do when nothing is wrong, and everything is working properly, because over 80% of it is to detect problems you hope you will never see ... just my 2 cents, Laura _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
