[Edu-sig] Webster Van Robot

[Steve Howell]

--- On Mon, 9/8/08, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com>
> To: "Andre Roberge" <andre.roberge at gmail.com>
> 
> So no explicit target or receiver for the message, as the
> Smalltalk
> people might say?  I.e. you don't say myturtle.move()
> but just move(),
> more like Logo?
> 

Hi Kirby,

There are some object-oriented variants of Karel the Robot:

http://pclc.pace.edu/~bergin/karel.html

Guido van Robot and Webster van Robot are purely procedural, which has the following benefits:

  1) There's a lot less typing, which means more time for thinking, exploring, etc.
  2) You can master simple, but fundamental, concepts like creating methods and nesting loops without the conceptual overhead of object-oriented programming.

I would love to brainstorm ideas on creating a path from GvR and WvR to more object-oriented programming.  IMHO you need to make sure you do it in a non-superficial way.  For example, I would want your object space to be rich enough that you actually have objects that interface with each other.

Perhaps I'm biased by my own experiences.  I started off with procedural languages and learned a lot from them.  I had some time to understand their limitations, so when I was finally introduced to object-oriented programming (C++ in my case), I was highly motivated to appreciate its benefits.  Also, as Python programmers, I guess we can all appreciate that OO and procedural programming can live side by side.

To me one of the biggest advantages of object-oriented programming is the notion of data encapsulation.  Guido and Webster don't even deal with data.