[Edu-sig] Explaining Classes and Objects

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sun, 12 Jun 2005 22:08:50 PDT, "Kirby Urner" writes:

>OO really is a different world.  I think it still makes sense to teach the
>subject historically, even though we *can* start with objects at the same
>time.  In other words, have students relive some of the trauma of moving
>from the procedural paradigm to the object oriented one -- not to
>traumatize, but to give the flavor of what "paradigm" even means (including
>that switching between them may be difficult).


This may make sense for people who already know procedureal programming, but I don't
think that it is a good idea for the rest of the world.  I think that you need to
learn about exception handling _early_ ... say right after you learn how to
write a loop, and unit testing, and test driven design from the moment you get 
out of the 'how to play with the interpreter' stage.

There isn't a lot of use in teaching people the procedural necessity of doing a
huge amount of data validation, and how to deal with the 'cannot happen' of malformed
data.  It makes for really ugly code -- where it is close to impossible to find out
what the code is supposed to do when nothing is wrong, and everything is working properly,
because over 80% of it is to detect problems you hope you will never see ...

just my 2 cents,
Laura