On Wed, 24 Apr 2019 at 16:52, Richard O'Keefe <rao...@gmail.com> wrote:
The one method needed to solve the problem is 18 lines.
The test code, including all available test cases, is 27
lines, of which 18 lines is the test data. Tests were
needed primarily to sort out what the problem actually *was*;
exercism doesn't even try to provide good specifications.
No debugging time at all was needed, precisely because the
code was so simple and obvious.
But we do want to showcase our debugger and demonstrate how to get the
most out of it.
The way the exercises are structured is to sequentially enable one
test at a time, see how that fails and fix it, so students will be
regularly interacting with debugger.
If it *had* been needed,
viewing the result right next to the expression that yielded
it would have given me all the context I needed, in one window.
If you want to learn how to design a good set of classes,
this is an absolutely dreadful problem. In fact ALL of the
exercism problems are going to be dreadful for *that*
purpose because they are provided for languages that do not
*have* classes.
Yes, we noticed that.
Do you have any problems more suited to class creation that we might
contribute to the Exercism problem specifications?
If you want to learn how to *solve problems*,
then you need to learn to write code that is simple, clear,
testable, and so on. You certainly need to learn how to use
what is already there in the language (except where that is
expressly forbidden).
My understanding of the Exercism's purpose is:
* not to teach how to solve programming problems; but
* to facilitate existing programmers to develop fluency in new
languages (although that doesn't preclude complete beginners using
it).
[ref: search "fluency" at
https://opensource.com/article/17/1/interview-katrina-owen-founder-exercism]
I completely agree that designing a good set of classes is
a very very important skill for anyone who wants to do OOP.
I completely agree that practising this on problems you can
hold in your head is a good idea.
I completely agree that if *that* is your objective,
writing minimalist code is not the best strategy.
On Wed, 24 Apr 2019 at 16:59, Richard O'Keefe <rao...@gmail.com> wrote:
TL;DR version:
"But if the purpose of problems is to lead students in new ways of
thinking about structuring OO solutions for maintainability"
It would be very good
if somebody did craft such a set of exercises, and Pharo would be a very
good environment for them. The exercism exercises will not do.
If the existing set of exercises is not great for this, hopefully we
can produce some to demonstrate Pharo's facility for it.
The problem with exercism is that while it does have a
criterion by which you can tell whether you have *solved the
problem*, it provides *no* way to assess your class design.
You don't get told "this is good, that is bloated"; there is
no feedback about the *quality* of your code except via
comments from those few people who can be bothered to look
at other people's solutions and comment on them. And since
many of them will also be beginners, their comments may not
always help.
Hopefully we can grow participation of experienced mentors
to share the load providing *quality* feedback to distinguish the
benefits of Pharo.
This particular problem is very similar to a "Langton's Ant"
problem my old department gave to students, who were expected
to solve it in two or three hours. And ALWAYS, the thing that
held them back was creating classes they didn't need and
agonising over what data and methods should go where (and then
getting it wrong, such is the nature of Java).
My immediate reaction to that is that agonizing and getting it wrong
are a useful part of the learning process, but I recognize I could
just be being contrary :) .
I'll keep your observations in mind.
When a problem can be solved quite directly in 18 lines of
clean code, you are going to have a very hard time persuading
me that even one more class pays for itself, especially in a
system with a rich class library of stuff you don't have to write.
Not trying to persuade you personally.
Just providing an alternative viewpoint for anyone to consider.
cheers -ben
