Nadeem wrote:
I understand that all this can be done with classes and OO
programming, but the whole point of the HtDP curriculum is to
introduce students to programming in a pedagogically-effective way
using a functional approach instead of OO-first.
And yet, one of the HtDP authors just posted a paper that argues that
it's time to abandon the whole idea of "programming language paradigms"
in teaching, and focus on language features instead.
Most books rigorously adhere to the sacred division of languages
into "functional", "imperative", "object-oriented", and "logic"
camps. I conjecture that this desire for taxonomy is an artifact
of our science-envy from the early days of our discipline: a
misguided attempt to follow the practice of science rather than
its spirit. We are, however, a science of the artiļ¬cial. What
else to make of a language like Python, Ruby, or Perl? Their
designers have no patience for the niceties of these Linnaean
hierarchies; they borrow features as they wish, creating melanges
that utterly defy characterization. How do we teach PL in this
post-Linnaean era?
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk-teach-pl-post-linnaean/
Alright, his emphasis is on teaching programming language *design*
features (and there's still the usual tone of "Scheme is right all the
time and the others make mistakes all the time", despite the recent RS6S
brouhaha ;-), but I'd say you should think twice before exposing your
students to an absurdly artificial rendering of one language's model in
another language's syntax. It's trivial to show how Python's method
*syntax* is used to associate ordinary functions with "attribute
containers" without having to first introduce OO as a formal concept.
</F>
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