in reply to Re^2: Your main event may be another's side-show.
in thread Your main event may be another's side-show.

The fact that “design patterns” were “promoted too widely and misinterpreted even more so,” certainly blunted its effectiveness as a potential teaching tool.   But, no one can deny, “silver bullets sell much better than the regular ones.”

The observation is a sound one:   many of the world’s successful computer programs have a certain observable structure, and said structure can be usefully studied in a purely-abstract way.   But students are rewarded for knowing the “right” answer, and for constructing their little programs in just the “right” way.   And, for picking up a hammer and seeing nothing but nails everywhere.   Because they were rewarded for seeing patterns everywhere, and for selecting the “right” pattern and for producing their stuff to “look just like that,” the good-idea backfired.   I find students who have entered the working-world who do not really know how to work with more-“indefinite,” production, code bases.   They are still looking for “the right answer.”

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Re^4: Your main event may be another's side-show.
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Oct 18, 2010 at 23:02 UTC
    I find students who have entered the working-world who do not really know how to work with more-“indefinite,” production, code bases.

    Certainly people with less experience tend to have less nuanced understandings of the world than people with more experience.

    If you discredit anything based on the inexperience of novice developers, you have to discredit everything. The fact that a fresh undergrad might use Singleton everywhere by no means lessons the value of being able to say "This calls for a Schwartzian transform!" or "I'll just throw in the Y combinator!" in my mind.

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      Teh question is: does starting people of with paint by numbers lead to the eventual creation of good artists?

      Or simply lots of people who are expert at painting by numbers?

      I don't think there is a definitive answer to that. It is a question that has raged in education circles for decades.

      Whether it was 'The New Math' or 'Phonetic (developmental) Spelling' or a raft of other attempts to simplify the teaching process, they all rely upon the presumption that eventually, the 'proper' knowledge will take hold and supplant the teaching aid in the minds of those so educated.

      But there is an old adage that it is far harder to unlearn your bad habits that it would have been to learn the right way to start with. And history shows that to be the case.

      Another old adage is: those whom ignore history, are destined to repeat it.

[reply]

        Another you might add to your bag of holding: Un bon mot ne prouve rien.

[reply]

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