Consider some of the common design patterns.
Strategy. Confronted with alternative strategy choices, a purely procedural code solution is either
- If-statements everywhere the strategy is involved.
- Block comments. (Pre-processor #if statements are the logical equivalent of block comments plus a tool to move them around just prior to compilation.)
These lack flexibility and seem to devolve into a quagmire of mystery. The if-statements often become tangled and complex. More importantly, some strategy choices — which are unused — may not be maintained at all. Of course, the block comments are never maintained.
Command. Often a command design requires a "code" or "label" and a big-old sequential switch (BOSS™) statement to select among the procedures which implement the various commands. Once "composite" commands are introduced, this devolves into nonsense. Ideally, it's a simple recursion, where a composite command simply invokes the sub-commands. However, folks get nervous about recursion and try to write weird loops.
State. A state design always seems to involve labels or codes for the state names and a slightly different big-old-state-switch (BOSS™, no accident that this is the same acronym) to sort out the variant behaviors in the distinct states. This shouldn't become too confusing. After all, Turing machines and other mathematical abstractions give us a strong hint on how we should proceed.
The problem with stateful procedural programming is that the state changes can be hidden everywhere. In the Really Bad Languages, variables can change values without an assignment statement! In the Not Bad Languages, we can track down the various assignment statements and try to reason out the state changes. Procedural code—without a lot of adult supervision—never seems to encapsulate state change with the the same in-your-face clarity that OO programs do.
I Could Go On
The point is this. While procedural programming could be done well, there appear to be a lot of obstacles inherent in the paradigm.
The best procedural programming I've seen has always been very object-oriented. Each procedure or function had a distinct data structure it worked with; they were all closely related by virtue of naming or file structure; much like a class definition.
I'm starting to wonder if my Building Skills books are taking the right approach. I start with the procedural aspects of Python. I'm beginning to feel that this may be a disservice to the n00bz.
Perhaps it's better to swap the order of the sections and start with the various Pythonic data structures and introduce the various statements sort of "casually" as part of demonstrating how a data structure is supposed to be used.
The intro to Java programming class I took many moons ago emphasized object oriented design and tail recursive algorithms. Java for/while loops weren't introduced until near the end of the class.
ReplyDelete"Perhaps it's better to swap the order of the sections and start with the various Pythonic data structures and introduce the various statements sort of "casually" as part of demonstrating how a data structure is supposed to be used."
ReplyDeleteLets step back and explicitly state what the goals are.
Lets step back and remember the clue absorption rate of the student.
Lets step back and not try to do too much and end up loosing focus.
How about a 3rd book entitled something like doing procedural code correctly when you don't want to be bothered w/ OO?
I am currently working my way through your book "Building Skills in Python" and loving it. It follows the "expected" standard procedural language progression. Heck even Oracle's PL/SQL manual does it.
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/appdev.102/b14261/toc.htm
For a related blog also posted by Steve Lott, check out "The Anti-IF Campaign"
ReplyDeletehttp://slott-softwarearchitect.blogspot.com/2010/12/anti-if-campaign.html
I think the procedural approach still is the best way to start teaching how to program. Although, it is not the best abstraction when the application gets some non-trivial complexity. Then, some encapsulation is necessary.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, encapsulation is an abstraction that helps to handle complexity, but it is not the first concept n00bz must learn.
I don't agree that starting with a data centric view is better than a procedural one. Any structured data is also an arrangement to solve some kind of problem and it is not necessary to solve initial programming concepts.
I also think starting with procedural design is still the right thing to do. However, part of the point of OO is to make it clear that procedural programming *doesn't scale well*.
ReplyDeleteAt the small scale, OO is overkill (even functions are overkill at a sufficiently small scale).
So Python starts with scripts: Top to bottom evaluation of the main script.
Then we add conditional execution and repetition (if statements and loops), but still no distinction between "definition time" and "execution time"
Then we start to modularise blocks of execution as functions and introduce the idea that algorithms can be stored for use in multiple places so that "definition time" and "execution time" may be separated.
Then we start to modularise data and operations on that data as classes.
Then we start to modularise collections of classes (and potentially data and standalone functions) as separate modules (and now we can optionally introduce the idea of "compilation time" as separate from both "definition time" and "execution time").
Then modules may be bundled into packages, and packages into frameworks and applications (introducing "build time" and "installation time" as two new potentially important phases in program execution).
Part of the art of software design is learning how to choose an appropriate level of complexity for the problem at hand.
In my opinion, the *reason* "scripting" languages are easier to learn for many people is that they permit you to start immediately with a main module that "does things", allowing the introduction of the "function" and "class" abstractions to be deferred until later.
Starting with C and Java, on the other hand, always requires instructors to say "Oh, don't worry about that boilerplate, you'll learn what it means later" before starting in with the explanation of what can go inside a main() function or method. The "compilation time" vs "execution time" distinction also has to be introduced immediately, rather than being deferred until the introduction of file level modularisation.