From: Chris Pine <cpine@...>
Date: 2004-09-30T22:12:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Too Many Ways?

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 11:09:33 +0900, Gavin Kistner wrote:
>�At what point do you cross over from: "Various ways to accomplish
>�the same goal is good, because it allows the language to work the
>�way different people think about working." into the land of:
>�"Duplicate names and techniques to do the same atomic thing ends up
>�confusing the nubys" ?

Simple:  nubys should only be taught one way to do a thing.  What's harder than learning to program?  Learning to program twice.  Or you could ask, I'm getting ready to teach someone two things about Ruby... shouldn't they be *different* things?

(This is something I really tried to follow in my tutorial, which even has a TMTOWTDI section near the end:  http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/)

So I think the cross over is really in the other direction:  from nuby to TMTOWTDI.


On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:04:00 +0900, David A. Black wrote:
>�If only the things that make life easier for newcomers could
>�disappear later, like training wheels on a bicycle.... :-)

So naturally I completely disagree with this!  :)

Duplicates do *not* make things any easier for newcomers.  Learning something twice is just that much harder, and then having one of them disappear later would be disastrous.  Again, I think it really moves in the other direction:  from nuby to TMTOWTDI.

(Yes, if you are teaching Ruby to a functional programmer, you use map instead of collect (are those really the same? I just always avoided collect:  wrong english word, I think), but you still teach them only *one* of them.)

First you learn one way to do it.  (Depending on your background, lambda might make more sense than proc (nevermind that these *aren't* the same, though I'll never keep up with that).)  Then, once you are doing a pretty good job of coding Ruby on your own, you learn a few other ways to do things so you can read other people's code (which is always a little trickier, anyway).

Just some thoughts,

Chris