OO and Procedure programming

[Bobrobyn]

I went to the university of Guelph a little while ago for a open house (about a week ago last Friday). It was actually quite fun, as the people from the CS department actually talked to us. Anyways, they had a bit of a different philosophy when it came to teaching programming: learn procedural programming in a lanuage like C, struggle with it, and then when it comes to learning Java you'll appreciate the whole concept of object orientation. They also thought that doing OO first confused people, too.

Anyways, I was wondering what you guys thought about this. I agree that you will appreciate OO after doing procedure programming, hehe.

[rizzix]

Yes we did, infact we had some lengthy discussions and we pretty much assumed that this was the right way to learn languages (at least imperative languages).

Top-down flow -> Procedural -> Modularization -> Object Orientation.

[wtd]

The language and "paradigm" is vastly less important than the teacher.

The problem also is that an absolutely huge number of people (instructors included) get overly focused on a particular approach to programming, grow overly fond of it, and then skew comparisons accordingly.

Coming from C to Java, Java is going to look like the greatest thing on Earth, and it won't have a darn thing to do with object-oriented and procedural programming.

If you want some idea of my approach to teaching, look at my Introduction to Java.

[codemage]

I shudder to think of starting students off with C.

C is a professional programming language. In the interest of efficiency it whimsically skips over enormous potential errors, believing that the programmer knows what he is doing.

Students have a rough enough time finding their logic errors when their IDE is pointing out the line that is erroring for them.