At 09:26 AM 2/16/00 +0000, Stefan Elisa Kapusniak wrote:
.....
>   I have a nagging notion that part of the problem here
>   may be that "self" shouldn't have the name "self". I
>   think I'd feel better if it were "thisObject" or
>   something.  "self" really indicates me, myself, sitting
>   here at the keyboard typing this email.  I suspect
>   non-programmers find the overloading of the word a
>   bit confusing.
>
>   It's sort of like having to pretend you're the object
>   to work out what's going on or what to say.  I think
>   this might act as a hurdle -- tho' I don't have any
>   evidence of it.

One could argue that if you take encapsulation seriously, you ARE the
object (or maybe the class) when you code in it. 

If one comes, for instance and on the other hand, from a programming
background in large open-coded systems with lots of tricky
interdependencies, then this viewpoint might seem unusual, or even limiting.

>From having taught a couple of hundred Smalltalk newbies during my stint as
trainer at ParcPlace Systems, one thing evident was that non-programmers
actually got along quite well with the pure object-oriented approach --
including the encapsulation as well as the message-based syntax. What took
effort for them was getting used to the degree of precision entailed by
programming in general, and some of the more technical abstractions, like
blocks as in-line code made into an object, recursion, and, of course,
'super'.

The more striking difficulties were had by more experienced programmers,
especially of  the C/C++ variety. Here there often arose a fierce
psychological resistence to the idea that human-based rather than
machine-based abstractions should shape the endeavor.

Watching a lot of this discussion go by here is a lot like deja-vu all over
again.  

Chris Macie