Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote:
Java should be learned as a first step to learning OO concepts,
Ugh... but it teaches sooo many bad habits.
You know, I hear this kind of thing over and over. I don't buy it.
I'm not selling. It just *does* teach bad habits. :-)
We don't complain about people reading crappy books because it
"teaches bad habits". We don't complain about people doing creative
writing in schools because it "teaches bad habits".
We let people do things and then we provide feedback. It's called
learning and teaching.
I'm astounded that you can reason this while simultaneously asserting
that one shouldn't be teaching students C++....
Now, I think you can teach people to code in most any language, but if
you are going to be selective about what languages you teach, presumably
you'd select a language with a clean design, both in terms of syntax and
its libraries. Why? Because students are going to invest a lot of their
time and thinking trying to understand and work with the language's
design. If I'm going to worry about the language at all then, You can
try pointing to it all and saying, "this is bad, this is bad, etc.", but
there is a benefit to being able to show them something that isn't and
not having them spend an inordinate amount of time unlearning the
problems with language.
--Chris
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