CS/SE education topic: WHY do so many books/instructors have students program a student DB/gradebook/etc. as an early exercise, esp in OOP?
I guess, but somehow it seems wrong to me to introduce a tool with a problem it's totally unsuited for. First impressions and all..
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But it's only "totally unsuited" because you're used to larger scope/scale of problems. For one student/class grades, most DBs are overkill
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It's more a matter of philosophy & what you consider idiomatic to teach, which of course makes it more open to valid diffs of opinion.
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As a real world example of where OO representation of persistent data (or even "constant" data) as lang objects leads to nonsense...
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I saw a foreign-lang dictionary util in Java that loaded the whole (flat, sorted) dict file in tree object for sake of binary-searching it.
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The catch? It only performed one lookup (from the command line) then exited. So all the data structures were useless inefficiency.
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For me the thing that "program level objects are not your persistent-data model" is a pretty important foundational concept.
End of conversation
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