Re: BlindConfidential: Learning to Program for the Blind

  • From: Veli-Pekka Tätilä <vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:14:42 +0200

Hi Arnold,
I'm not sure Java might be the best start, either, although it is widely
popular. In our Uni in Finland Java is used mostly procedurally and
there's a separate course on object oriented programming, also in Java.

The authors of how to Think like a Computer Scientist, the PYthon
edition. argue that one of the strong points of multi-paradigm langs is
that you don't have to cover objects first. They clame it is hard to
teach object first, since to really understand them one needs knowledge
of variables and scope, functions, operators, parameters and all the OO
jargon for relatively non-magical things. WIth a multi paradigm language
hello world is just like:

puts "hello world"

Or something like that, and you can start with very simple procedural
concepts, and cover functions, objects etc... when people are ready to
tacle them. I still recall trying to understand OOp from a procedural
background and all this talk of objects sending messages to each other
and having contracts just threw me off. But statements like basic
objects are just like structs with syntactic sugar for calling functions
taking structs, and no direct access to struct members allowed, are
closer to a procedural programmer mind set, and are more descriptive,
too. There's even a book about object oriented programming in c, though
I wouldn't start with C. Perl's object orientation heavily relies on
procedural concepts and references, too, but Perl is a bit too
specialized to start with I'd say e.g. no separate float, string and int
handling, plus abnormally strong string processing in the core. I'd
start out with a conventional, statically and strongly typed language at
any case, since it is, in my view, easier to see some advantages of both
static and dynamic typing, if you have learned static typing first. but
that's just my experience, I'm just a student.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila

Arnold Bailey wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>Jared had my intentions right. I only meant to use it as a very basic tool
>for interactive use to show a first time middle schooler what a program is.
>It is the interactive use that is a plus. My scenario doesn't require
>indentation, etc. After that first session I am using Java.
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