11 Dec
2006
11 Dec
'06
4:04 p.m.
On Monday 11 December 2006 14:11, Cesare Marilungo wrote:
John Perry Barlow, Vint Cerf, Richard Dawkins, Doug
Engelbart,
Marvin Minsky, Nicholas Negroponte, Seymour Papert and so on.
Did you know that you're making ridicule of a big chunk of the
history of informatics?
It does kinda make sense that they'd be using a 25-year-old
language in their project when so many of those people reached
their creative peak 25 or more years ago.
Unfortunately, the presence of famous people doesn't
automatically make a project intuitive, modern, or good for
teaching kids. Squeak needs some updates, and maybe it needs
new blood to make them happen, even if there are no PhD's
contributing code anymore. Sure, a bunch of us could go in
there and incorporate most of the functionality of something
like Pd, but then it might not be Squeak anymore.
I personally think it needs some changes to the underlying
language to make it accessible to first-time coders
(scriptHello/self.setCharacters("Hello World")? How is that
better than TO Hello/PRINT [Hello World]/END or good ol' Sub
Main/Print "Hello World"/End? Or Sub Form_Open/Me.Text = "Hello
World"/End if you need to be all OOPsy.)
But people with CS PhD's love Smalltalk and sneer at Logo and
Basic, so I imagine sooner or later, kids will be stuck with
Smalltalk. At least third world kids, if the OLPC thing ever
takes off.
Rob