Matt Daubneys Blog

Today I’ve been mostly teaching myself the oddities of C++. Now C++ is an object orientated language that’s an extension of C. This has led me to a revalation.

Recently at work I’ve been doing masses of OO stuff (as a change from the previous stuff I was writing which was largely linear) and as a result of that I’ve started seeing the world in terms of objects. Now in order to achieve what I needed at work, I ended up reading up on the theory of objects and what they actually are. In times past when I’ve been “taught” how to program (rather than teaching myself) , the content of the classes where more designed for a specific language on how to solve a specific problem. I think I only once sat in a computing based lecture that talked about the more abstract issues in programming. Whenever I start designing a program I always go back to that single lecture, and a few books that have a higher level stance on problems (such as Design Patterns)  and then once I’m passed that do I go to the language specific things.

The reason I digress this far is that after learning all this meta-stuff, learning another language is actually relatively easy. Now everything is falling down to syntax rather than subject. Going back to the title, I think that those lectures that taught me to do this in this language because it does that has got things backwards. They were doing the training first in the hope it would teach you something. What they should be doing is teaching you the concepts (all the “meta”) and the train you in the language.

Teach and then train, not train and then teach. Something I shall have to try and follow more often in the future.

(Many thanks to Alan Bell for the inspiration in the title )