Reaction for: Old Dogs, New Tricks by Lucas
My initial reaction after reading this paper was, "So what's your point?" Much like their catch-phrase, their entire article was cliched. Old dogs can learn new tricks? Big surprise. Anyone, of any age, who applies themself, can learn something new.
If this experiment were to be repeated, you'd probably get different results. IMHO, this has nothing to do with the difficulty of the material but more with the instructors and character of the enrollees.
I learned to program procedurally (coincidentally I did this in C++, not realizing what OOP was), not having a clue as to what polymorphism was. I noticed none of the paradigm shift that this article contends is the major hump of the Procedural -> OOP sh
ift. Programming is tough to learn regardless.
Reactions
Saul's piece
There are some good discssions about this on Shoe's
reaction. You made some good points about it being hard no matter
what your experience; the data
here with 90% averages does not corroborate that point
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