[geeks] Go Apple....

Dave McGuire mcguire at neurotica.com
Sun Jul 28 21:17:27 CDT 2002


On July 28, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > Well...I don't consider BASIC programmers to be programmers
> 
> They are - they just havent learned a real language yet. 8-)
> 
> The "hardest" part of becoming a "programmer" is learning the *concepts* -
> everything after that (different languages) is just learning different
> syntax to do the same thing.

  Yes, but knowing where the dividing line falls is VERY important.  I'd
been a procedural programmer for a very long time...starting with
Pascal, then assembler, then FORTRAN and C.  Wrapping my brain around
object-oriented methodology (to the extent that I have) took a lot of
work...until I "got it", I found myself very effectively writing
procedural code in an object-oriented language.  This is a very easy
mistake to make.  In Java, classes and methods are more than just
containers for bonding together a group of procedural-style functions.
But how easy it is to treat them as such!  Here's where the concepts
and syntax idea becomes fuzzy, at least for me.

        -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                  "Needing a calculator indicates that
St. Petersburg, FL              your .emacs file is incomplete." -Joshua Boyd



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