I'm not sure I'm sold on BlueJ. There is something more to being a good programmer than understanding OO concepts.
Having to type some commands in a shell force you to learn some very basic concepts. Things like filesystems, what the OS actually goes through to lanuch a program, etc. There are some basic principals that are much more deeply rooted than those of OO programming that should be understood before you try to hide them behiind the curtain of cute boxes linked to gether on your screen.
It's this lack of understanding about what is behind those objects that is the same basis for why VB programmers get no respect.
Is teaching with BlueJ a way to make programmers that think they can program without really knowing what they are doing? The result being a program with a pretty UML graph that performs poorly or has other fundamental problems because the programmer didn't have true understanding of how computer systems work.
I understand that the goal is to teach good OO habits from the beginning so the programmer is tainted with a history of 'old-style' icky procedural techniques, but does it really result in better programmers? |
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