From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2002-09-07T21:21:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Alan Chen wrote:
> 
>>Larry Wall said in
>>http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/06/1343222&mode=thread&tid=145
>>
>>"For instance, I think it's a violation of the Beginner's Principle of 
>>Least Surprise to make everything an object. To a beginner, a number is 
>>just a number. A string is a string. They may well be objects as far as 
>>the computer is concerned, and it's even fine for experts to treat them as 
>>objects. But premature OO is a speed bump in the novice's onramp. "
>>
> 
> A total beginner, I think, would have the same amount of difficulty
> learning OO vs. non-OO languages.  For a beginner to ruby, but not to
> programming, I would think that the learning curve would be strongly
> background dependent.

Actually I have made a quite interesting experiance last year.
My wife started to study computer science. She was a total
novice: she has never written a line of code in any programming
languages. Interestingly the base course in programming featured Haskell.
Sometimes she came to me to ask questions and I had real problems,
but she she seemed to pick it up quite naturally.

The next course was about imperative programming in Pascal, and
I thought it would be really trivial for her after Haskell. It was
not the case: she has always complained that Haskell was so logical,
but Pascal is a real mess. I had to admit that she was right.
So I think the preconception that immperative programming is simple
to novices, and functional or OO was harder is simply not true. I
think it is based on the fact that most people enter the universities
or courses, have already experience in some imperative language.

Regards, Christian