Squeak in the Bio Metaphor (was Re: A stupid newbie question)
Mark Guzdial
guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Oct 10 13:22:26 UTC 2001
I'm still enjoying Ken's analogy, and I'd like to offer our reasons
for using Squeak (raison d'etre? raison d'Squeaktre?) within his
analogy.
- ENVIRONMENTAL NICHES: Server software doesn't have a dominant
species right now. Apache is the strongest and best, but doesn't run
everywhere (in all environments) nor is as flexible as we'd like.
With Squeak, we can provide server software
(http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki) that runs in any environment and
allows us to explore collaboration without concern for what island
we're on.
- THE ISLANDS WE LIVE ON: While Ken's right that 90% of the islands
out there are populated with the same species (Windows), some of us
willingly choose to live on other islands AND we need to move between
islands. I tend towards Mac (either species "Macus Superiorus" or
"Macosaurus," depending on your pov), and most of my students tend
toward Linux, with a few in Windows. We want to work together -- I
have some students working on collaborative drawing, others on music
projects, and still others on collaborative music editing. In
Squeak, we have a species that lives on all the islands and thus
allows us to work without regard for environment -- consider it a
superior species in that it can live in any climate or environment.
- FOR EDUCATION: My last raison d'Squeaktre won't fit into Ken's
analogy (at least, in my limited imagination), but let me still offer
it. Squeak is the best language for CS education available today,
period. It doesn't bind the schools to a specific hardware platform
or OS. The environment is DESIGNED to be easy to use for students.
It's a terrific IDE. The emphasis on media enables students to build
exciting, motivating projects easily. And the source code to
everything is there, in Squeak (e.g., use the debugger for exploring
anything) -- whether you're studying memory or MPEG, VRML or VMs,
processes or painting.
Thanks for the interesting perspective, Ken!
Mark
--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html
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