--On Thursday, September 27, 2001 8:21 PM +0200 G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl wrote:

> No, you have to separate all those good intentions and efforts of you and
> all the other builders AND the way all this work shows to the world: This
> article suggest that...

Herm?

I, personally, haven't lifted a finger to make Squeak into a Children's Programming Tool :)

Squeak, per se, *isn't* a Children's Programming tool, it's the tool that's 
being used to build the tool. Or something.

That the author didn't *seem* to be cognizent of all the many various efforts (completely aside from Squeak) in this area supports my contention that the author wasn't willing or able to find the relevant stuff, even *in* Squeak.

I think the gross ignorance charge is supported by the confusion over Alan Kay's relation to Squeak (alledgingly joining the open source project? Huh?).

Of course, one can *always* say, "Oh well, the failure of the writer was the failure of us to "market" to the writer..." Baloney. Given that Squeak has *not* been rolled out as a kid's thing yet (i.e., there *is* no end-user release), the author 1) should have discerned that (not hard), 2) taken that into account when evaluating it.

Not that that would require *softening* the evaluation of the system as is. 
It's not ready for mom and dad to download it for junior. We all know that. 
But one would have thought that the point of such an article is to investigate the various bits of the system.

Take this:

" For children, the target group, Squeak is hardly suitable to enhance
  creativity with the PC. Thus we still have to wait for a novice
  programming language suitable for children à la Logo."

This is sheer, unadulterated baloney. *Smalltalk* can work well for children.

Can you sit them in front of a raw squeak system and walk away? No. But show me a logo system for which that is true?

Or this:

"Real tests with the target group (children) as well as with experienced
 programmers, however, show a less satisfying picture.  Squeak admittedly
 presents itself with a simple and, after a second or third try, intuitive
 interface, although this mainly applies to functions like painting or
 music. But as soon as it gets to programming itself, not only the
 environment appears to be complex and comparatively outdated, but also the
 work with Squeak itself confirms this impression."

I would love to know a bit more about the testing methodology. Is this the system browser, the package browser, tiles, omniuser, and active essay, etc. etc. etc.

I write articles about stuff that itsn't always well documented. Lack of documentation or presentation is, of course, an issue. But making judgements about various bits of the system based on what seems to be a lack of understanding is a flaw in the author, IMHO.

So what can we derive from this article? That Squeak isn't well sold to bad 
authors/evaluators? I'll grant this. That it's not ready for keyturn mom 'n' pop operation? Granted. That one would be better off using Visual Basic 
or Delphi? Huh?

Note that the problem isn't just with the author's judgements about Squeak:

"Unfortunately, because a Logo successor for the PC, with which everyone
 can write simple and small programs, thereby exploring the secrets of PC
 programming, is missing so far. The young programming elite of
 tomorrow only can start early with languages such as Visual
 Basic or Delphi, which are still too complex for a genuine beginner."

This is just nonesense. Deceptive nonesense. It ignores huge swaths of *old*, well known work, from Hypercard to Cocoa to HTML. (And why programming elite? I thought we were after most everyone.)

So, did we learn anything new from this article about Squeak inherently or about it's public presense? I'd argue not.

In fact, I just *did* argue not :)

On a productive type note, what *would* be cool is to try to get experienced Squeaker/writers to start publishing articles, or for Squeak.org/Squeakland to have pointers to, say, the nuBlue book chapeter on 
learning with Squeak or to folks who'd be willing to be "press contacts".

(Also, remember that SqueakLand isn't quite up to full snuff...the Squeak Central folks are still reeling from the big move. One thing that would be cool is something analogous to SqueakNews only targeted to kids. Maybe even 
something like Cricket magazine! SqueakCricket would be very very cool.)

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.