Squeak in college education

John Pfersich jp1660 at att.net
Wed Feb 18 04:21:27 UTC 2004


Call me crazy, but I think that students should be first taking a 
course in object-oriented programming (or thinking) BEFORE they take 
a language course. I took a course like that (at either Harvard Night 
School or MIT , I don't remember which) around 1982-3 and I got 
hooked by OOP and I never looked back. But I'd been programming for 
over ten years by then, so I had the experience that a newbie college 
student would never have.  I saw that OOP would be a monstrous 
improvement over procedural programming, just as procedural 
programming with a block structured language [ALGOL-like] was much 
easier than with a spaghetti code language that only had GOTOs.


Aaron Lanterman wrote :
>As cool as Squeak is, I wouldn't want to use it for an intro course.
>I've heard the arguments of the "objects-first" movement, but I think
>students need to be "ready" to receive and appreciate objects. Within any
>object, there are little bits of procedural thinking going on, so it makes
>sense to get some of that first. Also, Squeak's programming environment
>can be extraordinarily intimidating at first, compared with, say the JES
>tool that Mark Guzdial's team came up with for Python. Of course the
>Smalltalk/Squeak programming environment is orders of magnitude more
>powerful than anything else I've ever seen, but absorbing all that power
>at once can be scary.



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