On Fri, Dec 27, 2002 at 02:38:55PM -0800, Curtis Poe wrote: > While admittedly those languages may help their students get jobs, I suspect > that telling them that OO is the One True Path is doing them a disservice.
I don't know about that. Given the four major paradigms (procedural, functional, OOP and logic), OOP is probably the least bad paradigm to teach if you can only teach one. Procedural programming has its limits, and if you don't preach some form of structured programming, it's very unscalable. Functional programming has very little use in the workplace, and logic programming is virtually unused outside of academia. OOP has a lot of literature, a lot of research, and is slowly adopting the better features from the other three paradigms. >From a didactic persepctive, it's difficult to impart when a simple procedural hack is the most effective solution vs. an over-abstracted OO solution. That's the kind of learning that comes from the school of hard knocks (and why most Perl programmers learn to appreciate Perl outside of academia). If Perl does belong in a CS curriculum, the most fitting place is as an elective, and possibly as an accepted implementation language for some of the upper level courses. Z.
