Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!news.swapon.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Chris Riesbeck Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: Recommendations for an online Introduction to programming using Java Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2013 12:22:11 -0600 Lines: 37 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net 1bsDxrEKp9vBWHQNK8yXZAbxzz8a3u0snC4IAVEgA/sQVVmQR9 Cancel-Lock: sha1:h6clPMQN0wTM58PyWY8pP1smf0s= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.2.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:26994 On 12/18/2013 1:32 PM, Stefan Ram wrote: > Chris Riesbeck writes: >> I looked at a couple of the early videos. A sincere effort but along >> with learning Java, you'll learn a lot of bad habits, especially in >> naming things. E.g., his first example is a hello world program in a >> class called "apples," thereby managing to make three mistakes in one >> short name. > > 1st) the name is not related to the meaning of the class > (most severe) > 2nd) it does not start with an upper-case letter > 3rd) it contains a comma > > The quality assessments of beginners and experts often > differ. A beginner senses whether the learning process > triggered by reading a book makes him feel good, and will > not always recognize it when he learns something that is > wrong. When the book tells the beginner: »You can name a > class any way you like as long as the name sounds really > cool, for example, try funny fruit names.«, a young beginner > might actually like this stance. Possibly, he will continue > to read this book, while he would have stopped reading a > more boring book even though it is more correct in technical > terms. So, the funny book with the mistakes might actually > make him learn more (some of which is wrong). I certainly agree with the need to engage and not intimidate the beginner. Knowing when to lie to students is an important part of teaching. One of the things that led me into math and then computer science was when a high school teacher misled me about what was already known about the square root of -1. But the part of me that reads college student code sees all these programmers who believe names don't matter, when they probably matter more than anything else. So somewhere down the line, before they release code into the wild, it'd be nice if someone told them you write code for people to read, not just computers.