[Edu-sig] Re: Best approach to teaching OOP and graphics

[Dan Crosta]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2005, urnerk at qwest.net wrote:
> But here's the thing, the question I think we're asking in this thread:
> how do we make it clear to students that OOP is NOT *just* about graphical
> programming?   You can write highly object oriented code that has no GUI
> whatsoever, is invoked only from the command line with switches, maybe runs
> in the background as a daemon process (like a database) and communicates
> with the outer world only through some ports over TCP/IP.  Is there
> anything less OOP about such code, which has no graphical shell?  No.  OOP,
> as a concept, is conceptually distinguishable from doing GUI or game or
> graphical programming, even though, as a paradigm, it has become probably
> the most popular way of doing all of those things.

Oh -- I think I misunderstood. I took graphics to mean computer graphics,
in the sense of 2D or 3D drawings, modeling, rendering, etc, not GUI
design. I've never worked with a non-OO gui toolkit (though I think GTK
is, if I'm not mistaken). My point about Java/AWT/Swing was not meant to
be about the language -- we just made a big Graphics object, and used its
drawline/drawrect/etc functions inside a big ol' while loop. It was a
pain, we had to maintain a lot of state that would have been better
served by using an OO approach to state maintenance (the two players,
their histories, etc) rather than lots of arrays, variables, etc.

dsc