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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