Employing the Message Paradigm to Ease Learning Object-oriented Concepts and Programming

Many popular object-oriented languages like Java, Python, C# support concepts introduced by Smalltalk but lack its message paradigm. Teaching novices programming in these popular languages, therefore, cannot take advantage of the message paradigm to ease and to speed up learning object-oriented programming. This article introduces and discusses the message paradigm in the context of successfully teaching object-oriented programming to business administration (BA) novices in a single semester. The messaging paradigm, as implemented in the open object Rexx (ooRexx) programming language, makes it easy for novices to interact with Windows objects via object linking and embedding (OLE) and fully utilize the Java runtime environment (JRE). The most important concepts of the ooRexx programming language are introduced and demonstrated using nutshell examples. Furthermore, observed challenges in teaching object-oriented programming are presented and advice for educators in the field of programming is given.