SEMI-OT: "Tricks" of the "Trade"
SEMI-OT: "Tricks" of the "Trade"
- Subject: SEMI-OT: "Tricks" of the "Trade"
- From: Charles Bennett <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2001 09:03:13 -0400
NOTE: This message has various parts of various messages munched and
combined. Hopefully, not completely out of context..
David Halliday Wrote:
>
I must admit, I did have a passing acquaintance with SmallTalk
>
before learning Objective-C, but that was really nothing more than reading the
>
SmallTalk 80 article in Byte magazine oh so many years ago.
<OFFTOPIC>
The issue with the smalltalk balloon floating away over a sea of other
languages? Never heard of it.. ;-)
I'm still a kid (at least at heart) but interface age and kilobyte (changed
very quickly to kilobaud) had small mentions of smalltalk as well.
Then again my first issue of Dr. Dobbs was saddle stitched, printed on newsprint,
and had a great PLM article that ran on our intel "blue" boxes..
</OFFTOPIC>
and Erik Thorteran wrote:
>
I think my problem is that whenever I try to make a class, it fails
>
miserably, so I make one mega-class that gets everything done.
Don't feel bad about the mega-class approach, it's called "procedural progrmming"
and folks have been doing it for years.
To switch to object oriented programming, the way you THINK about the problem you are trying to solve has to change.
When you finally "GET IT" it's almost tantamount to a religious
conversion. The light bulb comes on and you will discover that it's really hard to
think about problems the "old" way. If you really love programming and,
since you started at 12, I think you must really want to do it, keep reading,
playing around, and asking questions.
>
I will
>
experiment with subdividing. The funny thing is that I am only 14 and
>
have been programming only since I was 12, so short a time, so many bad
>
habits.
>
>
Erik
Another book to consider (pretty old) is
Object Oriented Programming
An Evolutionary Approach
by Brad J. Cox.
He is the author of Objective C and this book takes a pretty interesting
look at various programming languages before getting to ObjC. It was written
when the idea of object oriented programming was new and required a lot of explanation,
examples, and justification. For those reasons, I think that it would help you get around
your Mega-Class
>
Also, it does not make sense to me to subdivide this
>
mega-class because it is so tightly-woven, and between class method
>
calling is hard if they don't know about each other.
they get to "know about" each other via their header ".h" files. Objects that need
to communicate with each other usually include each others header files, so they know
what method the other object can perform. This also lets the compiler check your syntax
and catch typing errors early.
Feel free to ask specific questions. I can't speak for the list, but you can email
me offline if you want. My 9 year old daughter is following in your foot steps
so I'm used to answering these kind of questions.
chuck