The Developer's Code

Essay 35

Teach with Obvious Examples

For newbies, good examples are devoid of abstractions. They are concrete and clearly—almost too clearly—convey the intentions of what we’re teaching. They provide good context.

On the other hand, poor examples are littered with abstractions and vague differentiations. Here’s a classic case of such an example.

When Clarity Met Sally

Imagine we’re teaching a beginning programmer the basics of object-oriented programming. We might start, naturally, by discussing class constructors and object instantiation. At some point in our talk, we scribble a line of code like this:

For us, this is a ho-hum line of example code. It says to create an instance of an object of type Object ...