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Showing posts from May, 2008

Use examples to make your code easier to understand

Programmers are used to abstract thinking. To program is to generalize: A method is a general specification of what to do during execution. A class is a general specification of objects. A superclass is a generalization of several classes. Altough our minds are capable of abstract thinking, concrete thinking is much easier, and concrete examples are the foundation for abstractions. For instance, when we were children, our parents didn't try to teach us about cars by explaining to us cars are and what they can do. Instead, they just pointed at a car that was driving by and said ”Look, a car!” When they had done that a number of times, we knew what a car was. Another example is prejudice. We all have prejudices, because this is the way our minds work. If we have met a few people from Denmark in our lives, and those people were friendly, we ”know” that Danes are friendly. And this works even stronger for negative prejudices. My point is that we learn by examples. Einstein said t