[Edu-sig] modelling

[Kirby Urner]

>Get a lot further a lot faster in learning Java by pulling up the demos in a 
>plain vanilla text editor and following along.

Yes, we're in agreement.

Sometimes I forget the progression on my end:  learned dBase II, III, IV,
FoxPro in plain vanilla world (not even much color).  This was the age of
the original PC and PC XT.  Windows 3.0 wasn't even an option.  Later, 
FoxPro for Windows migrated us to the GUI, but by then we'd already been
doing a kind of windowing in DOS -- a lot of the syntax was already built
in.  There was a Mac version of FoxPro too -- same source ran on both.
But MSFT later dropped its commitment to that fork in the road.

Then Visual FoxPro phased in the classes and objects.  Learning curve
steep, for all of us (there's quite a FoxPro community, with magazines,
3rd party vendors, DevCons...).  Not just screen widget objects, but 
real classes you can define however, with inheritance and polymorphism.  
Plus of course you get that floating toolbar of controls (VBA/Access 
feels like a whole different can of worms to me -- you have the canned 
objects to play with, but how to extend a class hierarchy at the template 
level? -- FoxPro seems way more sophisticated, and you boot to a command 
window like IDLE's, not to some GUI wherein the "Immediate Window" is 
hidden away).

But I'd already been coding for years without any real IDE to speak of 
(those dBase's tried with the screen painters in ASCII mode, but they 
weren't "round trip" -- change the code in any way and your option to 
screen paint was broken).  So when the GUI IDEs came of age, I was by
that time a veteran with a text editor (not with Emacs though -- aside 
from a little work on the a PDP, I wasn't schooled in UNIX at all -- 
mostly used IBM VMS mainframe type stuff in school, a little JCL -- 
yech).  I dove into Linux with gusto, but after the partition table 
corrupted and left me booting to GRUB>, I've decided to stick with a
uniboot configuration.

My first language was APL.  Loved it.  Python reminds me of it. Again, 
mostly command line stuff, little scripts.  Some use of the Tektronix 
graphics terminals... PL/1, Assembler, SNOBOL, a little LISP, quite 
a bit of FORTRAN (one of the few other languages I've actually been 
paid to write in).  So as you can see, I'm quite an old man.  Except 
for APL, I did all of the above on punch cards (!)

When it came to Java, I didn't really start to get it until I read
Eckel's 'Thinking in Java' -- then the lights came on.  I study his
'Thinking in C' too sometimes, but haven't tried writing the stuff
since my Turbo C days back in DOS world.  At McGraw-Hill in the 1980s,
I did curriculum writing for middle schoolers, focusing on Logo and
BASIC (not Visual Basic, just plain BASIC).  That's the kind of 
personal experience I call up when doing curriculum writing around
Python -- plus my two years as a high school math teacher in Jersey
City...

Oh wait.  My first programming language wasn't APL -- it was whatever
you call it they put on the HP65, one of the first programmable 
calculators.  My friend's dad had one, and Mike and I would spend
some hours writing little programs for it, just for the fun of it.

Kirby