“They are free to use a construct that matches their intuition and meets their needs”

13 Oct 2011

For example, a well-known misconception among students learning about looping is the expectation that iteration can end in mid-loop, the instant a termination condition becomes true. And yet in this document I will present a language with looping constructs that work in just this way, are accepted as perfectly reasonable by inexperienced programmers, and are used by them to build effective robot behaviors. Does this mean that the old “misconception” can now be discarded as another artifact of the arbitrary requirements of an immature medium? Actually, in this case and many others, I think something much more interesting happens. What used to appear as a relatively isolated misconception is transformed into a part of a more general learning challenge with clearer connections to the rest of the world. In this case, for example, children still need (eventually) to master the differences between the two kinds of looping and the appropriate uses of each, along with parallel distionctions throughout the language. But in the meantime, they are free to use a construct that matches their intuitions and meets their needs.

[Source][1]: (Hancock, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, p. 17)