Please don't forget in all of this that people of all ages need help with
education and not just children. I cannot say for other countries, but in
England the working classes have a hard time getting a good education,
mostly engineered slyly by the some of the upper and middle classes "to keep
people in their places" or to keep competition out of the picture. There's
many very clever people who are considered 'thick' because they don't have
qualifications, but they don't have qualifications because they're education
is sabotaged. I've even been publicly and verbally attacked by a teacher for
daring to help a couple of students with some reading/literacy skills,
though he wouldn't admit that was the reason.

In the old days, it was harder for the commoner but some of the modes of
thought have been inherited.

I just hope that Squeak won't be targeted at just white upper and middle
class kids and that all people will be targeted.

Yours sociologically,
and with a family tree to support my words.
Gary
(and wearing the asbestos coat borrowed from Dan)





----- Original Message -----
From: "Bijan Parsia" <bparsia at email.unc.edu>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2001 8:51 PM
Subject: RE: Computerchannel.de: Squeak 3.0 tested


--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.