Moving from cowboy coding to agile development

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

FP vs. OOP?

Because my computer is still being fixed (luckily the repair seems to be covered by the guarantee) - and I can come up with a bunch of similar excuses (like my mail server blocking the invitation to the second/third coding dojo session in Helsinki) - I have concentrated on reading articles and blog entries on programming.

One of the most interesting topics I ran into was the issue of teaching programming to new students. There seem to be two quite strong schools: one in favour of FP (functional programming) as the first thing to teach, and one in favour of OOP (object-oriented programming) in the same role. One of the most interesting articles or publications on the subject was Matthias Felleisen's presentation How to Design Class Hierarchies (pdf, 95 pages - but reading the whole thing won't take more than 10 minutes).

Felleisen raises some interesting points - at least interesting to me, since I started my "academic" programming life with Java.

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