[Newbies] Using Squeak to teach undergrads OOP

Lawson English lenglish5 at cox.net
Sat Jan 16 21:33:38 UTC 2010


waufrepi III wrote:
> Hi,
>   I was talking to one of my Professors about Squeak the other day and 
> I got an mail asking:  
>
> "I had lunch with several of the other CS faculty yesterday and I 
> brought up your enthusiasm for smalltalk, which I've never used. Some 
> of the faculty panned it because they claimed the I/O features were 
> either poor or nonexistent. [Java will never be displaced as the first 
> language at ............] What is your impression of the I/O abilities 
> of smalltalk? There is much discussion about the need to learn a 
> language with OOP features before Java.
>
> I'm still a novice and I actually haven't been able to play with 
> squeak much lately do to other classwork..so rather than blow an 
> opportunity for squeak I thought I'd ask here and see what the pros say.
> wfpi

I'm a squeak beginner myself. I can tell you from experience that squeak 
is a contradictory conglomeration of wonderful features and lame 
implementations that may or may not make it suitable for teaching a 
given intro-to-OOP class. Can you point us to class notes from previous 
classes from the same institution where Java or C# or C++ or Python was 
used? It is entirely possible that Squeak doesn't have good coverage of 
the facilities (other than OOP itself) that are expected from a modern 
language for that particular class. It is also entirely possible that 
the professors don't know what they are talking about.

Without more information, it's all conjecture.


Lawson


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