On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Crossfire wrote:
> From: David Zverina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > any _decent_ $foo programmer can pick up $bar. Sorry couldn't resist
> either.
> > :)
>
> And its for this reason why you should pick well designed languages for
> education, rather than real-world langauges.
Surely that comment was at least a little tongue in cheek. In any case,
when you are asking what is a good language for education, there is more
at issue than just the language design. As I suggested already, two
important issues are whether there are lots of examples you can look at,
and whether there are lots of people you can talk to about how to
approach and solve problems.
If we consider Blue (if you weren't meaning Blue any more ignore this
para), I think we'd find that the set of people you can talk to
meaningfully about programming in Sydney with a beginner's knowledge is
limited to USyd people. I think that you'd need to be finding some
incredibly convinving reasons for the superiority of Blue over Java to
teach it given the above issues. And it's funny how what one person
thinks is a design "feature" is a deficiency to another person. For
example, Blue only supports one form of polymorphism (for the
programmer), and a Blue advocate once told me that this was an
advantage, since it kept beginners focussed on oo and object
polymorphism. I have the exactly opposite view, which is that object
polymorphism should always be contrasted against at least one other kind
of polymorphism.
If you are suggesting something other than Blue, I'd be interested to
hear the suggestion.
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