"Excited people about fun languages" have more chances of becoming useful than "bored people about boring languages", because they're more likely to continue. There are many many people who studied programming as part of some other course and have the idea that it's about fighting with a compiler, or taking a professor's solution and modifying it to make it work without touching the predefined bits. Or as in the course I studied, that programming is about remembering that int/int gives int, and the syntax of a for loop.
Plenty of perfectly capable people avoid programming because of dull or overly difficult initial presentation, and Java is part of that problem. One of my colleagues is perfectly capable with Perl and is now learning Java because the client wants him to, so he wrote something trivial and had to learn about exceptions and static before he was going to be interested in them. He's not put off, but I remember when I was teaching, that as soon as you had to involve exceptions to load an image file, eyes started to glaze and it was a battle to bring them back to full interest. On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 7:36 AM, Fabrizio Giudici <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:36:13 +0100, Ricky Clarkson > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I think the point is to maximise the chances that the student enjoys and >> continues programming, rather than worrying that they might be missing >> low-level concepts, etc., at least in the first instance. > > > Excitement must be put in the proper perspective. Excited people about fun > languages who don't understand fundamentals have higher chances to become > useless and not making a great career (that's not exciting). I think that > there's a pedagogical value in properly focusing excitement: it's more > valuable to be excited because you are able to create something that works, > rather than the tool that you used. > > Not to mention that at the university not all classes were exciting to me. > For instance, math-based ones were boring to me (to me maths is fascinating, > but not something I'd like to do, such as mountaneering). Still I worked > hard and got almost always the maximum marks. It's a good thing that people > is taught to apply also to boring parts, because they can't be eliminated by > the real life. > > > -- > Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager > Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." > [email protected] > > http://tidalwave.it - http://fabriziogiudici.it > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Java Posse" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
