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Whenever I hear "Socratic dialog", I reach for my revolver. Is there any other form of teaching so irritating and patronising? You might have a brilliant store of insight to impart, but if you insist on trying to do so via a twee, affected and unbelievable conversation with a Mary Sue wise professor, I'm going to write you off as insufferable before the fawning moron you have as proxy for your audience utters their f…
This doesn't make sense to me: "Right. Now consider the area function. Its going to have a switch statement in it, isn’t it?" Perhaps I am nitpicking, or perhaps I am reading this wrong, but I would not design the square data structure to have a perimeter function. The square data structure should just expose the data that describes a square (length, width). Adding higher abstractions (perimeter, etc) on top of the d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the existence of `List` implies that e.g. `sort` exists? The existence of List implies that operations must exist to insert an element in a list, access to elements in a list, find out the size of the list, etc. Edit: BTW 'implies' is the the magic word in the text. It's what creates all the appearance of meaning. Try to replace it what something else. Now I remember why I disliked Plato so much.
Ding ding ding. The entire article hangs on “imply”. The question of where data is stored for an object is far less important than how to access data in a data structure. Like, the whole reason the data structure is designed the way it is, is to access it in particular ways.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the existence of `List` implies that e.g. `sort` exists? The existence of List implies that operations must exist to insert an element in a list, access to elements in a list, find out the size of the list, etc. Edit: BTW 'implies' is the the magic word in the text. It's what creates all the appearance of meaning. Try to replace it what something else. Now I remember why I disliked Plato so much.
I thought about using `[]`or `indexOf` as examples of operations, but my question still remains: what is implicit about it? It's part of the public interface of `List`. Not at all like the private members of an object, which I think was the analogy being made.
That said I don't think that any particular set of operations is implied. A data structure will be more suitable for some operations than others, but it won't really require anything in particular.
Data-structures are put most simply as ways of organizing data. The organization of the data implies a specific layout--a way of representing your data as a table of integers, ie. in RAM.
After reading the article, I don't see a meaningful distinction between objects and data structures. A data structure can be represented as an object, especially in OOP languages where it must be.
A general class doesn't necessarily lay out its data in any particular way--which allows abstraction over the data representation of the class.
However, some classes are made which are designed in a manner which guarantees a certain data layout. std::vector with its contiguous memory requirement comes to mind.
To add to this, the c++ conception of a "concept" or haskell's concept of a "typeclass", or even a generic class, is really what this article is talking about. Or even Java or Go's interfaces. There is absolutely no way to guarantee a specific data structure through an interface, typeclass, or concept, since they fundementally do not mention their data representation at all.
Whenever I hear "Socratic dialog", I reach for my revolver. Is there any other form of teaching so irritating and patronising? You might have a brilliant store of insight to impart, but if you insist on trying to do so via a twee, affected and unbelievable conversation with a Mary Sue wise professor, I'm going to write you off as insufferable before the fawning moron you have as proxy for your audience utters their f…
I completely understand and almost always share your reaction. Socratic CAN be done well - The novel Starship Troopers is actually like that...the arguments may not be your first pick, but you consider them all reasonable, and then you discover you're supporting fascism! It requires you to back up and find where you made a false connection. Unfortunately, the most common usage is at best ineffective, for as you say,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a purely oop language, data structures exist as an implementation detail, but you can never access them directly (as in, bypassing the object interface). That's by design.
I get that in your application, you may want to keep a linked list behind its interface 90% of the time. However, considering your system as a whole, at some point you may want to take that linked list data and write it to a database, in which case the cleanest thing is to bypass the interface and extract the "data structure object" so to speak and deal with it in a database-related object, rather than encumbering yo…
Whenever I hear "Socratic dialog", I reach for my revolver. Is there any other form of teaching so irritating and patronising? You might have a brilliant store of insight to impart, but if you insist on trying to do so via a twee, affected and unbelievable conversation with a Mary Sue wise professor, I'm going to write you off as insufferable before the fawning moron you have as proxy for your audience utters their f…
It's only patronizing to people who are motivated self-learners, such as you. To people who are unmotivated and/or struggling with the concepts (such as high school students), it works better than most other styles I've tried.
I've spent a lot of time tutoring high school and elementary school students. Many of them are so frustrated that they just want you to give them the answer. But then if you do they write it down and declare "problem solved." In the long run, students who continually weasel the answers out of their tutors end up far, far behind those who work with a Socratic teacher and are persuaded to try to think of the answers for themselves.
This conversation reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expression_problem . I don't understand: "but the existence of the data structure implies that some operations must exist." Grounding it out to a specific data structure, the existence of `List` implies that e.g. `sort` exists? That direction makes less sense than `sort` implies the existence of e.g. `List`(something to be sorted).