Re: Closures versus objects

On Feb 21, 2007, at 1:29 PM, Anton van Straaten wrote:

> John Clements wrote:
>> FWIW, here's the problem statement.  They didn't use mutation in  
>> this  assignment because they don't know how.
>
> I read this and thought of "The Forbidden Experiment", and what fun  
> it was that educators get to play with mild versions of that.

Every course is an experiment. I am just waiting for some  
administrator to discover this and to demand a Human-Experiment  
declaration.



> But thinking on the ethical issues, I realized that it's not so  
> simple: which are the feral children, the one who've grown up not  
> realizing there was any reason to avoid mutation, or the ones from  
> whom knowledge of mutation has been withheld?


As many of you may know, there has been suggestions and evidence that  
the quality of a programmer depends on the number of paradigm shifts  
NOT the number of years of programming experience (or even the  
highest degree obtained). So if you can get Freshmen to see how easy  
it is to write interactive GUI games with OO syntax and applicative  
style (compared to the procedural style usually superimposed on OO  
PLs), your school will win in the long run (at least mutatis mutandis).

Disclaimer: we have not yet figured out how to make the interactive  
applicative GUI style scale to all kinds of GUI events and modes. And  
I conjecture that we won't.

Claim: ... but if you do, you can use those games to teach second- 
semester freshmen how to prove theorems about their software, for the  
sake of teaching them how logic exposes bugs in code not necessarily  
for the sake of theorems per se of course. (We hope to report on this  
soon.)


-- Matthias