Re: proper use of classes

David A. Black wrote:
> Hi --
>
> On Fri, 30 Jan 2009, Tom Cloyd wrote:
>
>> David, Brian, Robert - THANKS!
>>
>> I'm fascinated to read your thoughtful responses, this morning - 
>> that, and gratified. You each responded in different ways, and have 
>> offered me considerable material to think on, and resources to 
>> explore. This is precisely what I was hoping for. I think you "got 
>> it" that I'm genuinely wanting to see this matter from the inside 
>> out, and your serious responses, coupled with my coding adventures, 
>> will get the job done, I'm sure.
>>
>> My "overthinking" (I've been accused of that before on this list!) is 
>> due to my background in philosophy. To my mind, making sense is the 
>> most important thing we do with our minds, and it often requires a 
>> lot of analytical probing, until all the meaningful dimensions of a 
>> problem space are explored. Only then have you mapped the domain 
>> adequately. That approach has often been my default method, with 
>> important things. Not everyone's style, to be sure, but it is mine.
>
> I definitely would not discourage exploration of this kind. I'm 100%
> in favor of fully understanding the techniques you're using, and
> knowing exactly what Ruby is actually doing. But I still think you're
> overthinking it :-)
>
> By that I don't mean that you should stop trying to understand. It's
> more that you're multiplying the complexity beyond what it actually
> is, for example by positing a kind of substitution relation between
> classes and methods.
Ah. Now I understand. I actually never positing that at all. I didn't 
clarify things when you implied that a while back. Was too busy trying 
to keep up with the new material in the developing thread. My problem 
was simply that as I was trying to introduce classes into my project 
code, I didn't know when I really SHOULD create a class. I had gotten 
the impression somewhere that major methods should virtually always be 
reconceptualized as classes. I didn't arrive at that notion by thinking. 
I'd given up on that, as I didn't have enough material to work with.

But, that perception didn't really make a lot of sense. Still, I 
couldn't find any explicit guidance anywhere regarding the fundamental 
question I kept asking: WHEN is it the thing to do to make a class? I 
did find those two sentences in Thomas (3rd ed) - but that's sparse 
pickins, and I didn't find them until AFTER my weekend disaster in which 
I spend a pile of time converting a complex method into a class, getting 
completely exasperated with the experience, and converting it back. So, 
I wasn't overthinking at all. I was mis-perceiving, in the presence of 
an absence (ha!) - an absence of clear guidance about the 
WHEN-do-classes issue. The best sense I could make of things was that 
"big stuff oughta be classes" (bad idea). I didn't yet "get it" 
(understatement).
>
> That said, I think it's true that people learn and grapple with new
> things in different ways. I tend to learn in what I think of as the
> "Polaroid" style: I start with a breadth-first but very faint
> perception of a technology, and gradually the whole picture comes into
> view. It's actually kind of weird, because I can know that I'm going
> to understand something by the end of the day, and yet not be able to
> accelerate the process.
This is one of two learning styles that has been documented among 
programmers, leading to the realization that programming needs to be 
taught simultaneously in two quite different ways - the left-brained 
folks need linear progressions and the right-brained folks need 
gradually emerging patterns, just as you have described for yourself.
>
> By the same token, I think that what I call "overthinking" is, as you
> say, your way of getting there. I just wanted to clarify the point
> that I'm not discouraging a deep understanding, just sounding the
> buzzer as you cross the invisible line between the road and the
> shoulder :-)
Hey, I can usually use all the warning calls anyone cares to give me, 
believe me!

In any case, this thread has been remarkably useful to me, in my 
tortured journey toward a more classy (uhem) way of programming.

BTW, I was puzzled for years by the mathematical notion of a function. 
It just eluded me. Baffled me. Then, as I was learning to program in 
Fortran, years ago, I began to wonder if there was any relation between 
Fortran functions (hope you know a little Fortran) and mathematical 
functions. Of course, there is. Fortran functions was no problem at all 
to grasp, and once I realized they were just another way of expressing a 
mathematical function (or perhaps I should say that a math function can 
be expressed as a Fortran function, and in fact that was what they were 
for), I was seriously rageful. I couldn't understand why something so 
easy had been made so hard (for me) in math. classes. I'm still a little 
pissed about that. There's little excuse for that kind of stupid teaching.

So, we must attend to our students, and how it is they REALLY learn. I 
like to think that we're better at that now than we used to be.

t.
>
>
> David
>


-- 

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Tom Cloyd, MS MA, LMHC - Private practice Psychotherapist
Bellingham, Washington, U.S.A: [phone]
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