Learning not just what a program does, but how to design it in the first place.
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2015-11-06 19:21:59 - Graham Ellis
A Programming course is not only about how a language works, but also about teaching the delegates to to plan their applications and programming using that language to make best use of existing resources, to develop code that works well and can be re-used and updated as the requirements drift in the future. Also to make sure that the code is structured in such a way that other programmers will be able to understand how it works later should the need arise.
Such techniques don't come easily from static examples that say "this program does the following" ... rather they come best from an interactive demonstration, and discussion during the demonstration, during a training course. All key elements of the language need to be taught / understood before such a demonstration / discussion so that delegates have a good understanding of the armoury at their disposal.
From the Lua course that's just concluded, [here] is the program that resulted from such a session. Of course, it's not what I should be showing you, as it breaks the advise in the first paragrapg of this article - "show them interactively" ... but I have added comments to explian the design steps. If you want to see the propper thing, come on one of our courses!