----- Original Message -----
From: Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2002 3:22 PM
Subject: Re: Learning Squeak


> Les --
>
> I think it would be great for some of the experienced Smalltalkers on
> the list to take a crack at making a "filtered Browser" for a core
> Squeak for beginners. How about ~ 100 classes to do most things? My
> personal preference would be for a set of abstractions that include
> Morphic instead of MVC, but any nice filtering would be a great
> start. To do this really nicely, it might require a few new classes
> to be made that are the higher-level abstraction for what is now
> "over subclassing" in the current system.

Actually, in the last few weeks I've been looking at Paul Fernhout's Embedded
Squeak.  I believe that this is based on a stripped-down Squeak 2.2 mini
image, resulting in only about 214 classes in the system.  Using this is
strongly reminiscent of what I had in V/286- except that even this version of
Squeak, running with 4-bit graphics depth,  feels much better.  I would have
been very happy to have a Smalltalk like this back then.  When I look at it, I
have a strong sense of  being able to Grok the whole thing- I can make the
whole thing my own, perhaps in the same sense that Papert talked about
children making math their own.  I don't get that sense when it looks like I
have thousands of classes to work with- its great that they are available, but
I'm not going to be taking personal ownership of them.  So, I feel there is an
important difference in the experience of being exposed to a few tens or
hundreds of classes, versus many hundreds or thousands.

Perhaps I am getting nostalgic, but lately I have also been thinking that we
are losing ( or have already lost ) something of the feel of the old
computers.  It may be unjustified, but I feel that there was more innovation
in the early days of micro-computing.  Why don't we call them "personal"
computers anymore?  Now they are PC's.   Ted Nelson had a quote that was
roughly "We used to worry about big companies tyranizing our lives with their
mainframes.  Now, thanks to the miracle of micro-electronics, we can be
tyranized by mainframes in the comfort of our own living rooms".  Neal
Stephenson wrote "in the beginning was the command line", roughly touching on
some of my feelings along those lines.  But I am more inclined to think the
issue was not GUI vs. command line, but rather the loss of alternatives ( no
matter how ugly ) when standardized ways of interacting with the various
computers were introduced.  Now, the tyranny is so complete that we hardly
question what we have.  Whatever happened to the totally blank screen, the
empty slate where you could imagine the computer doing things in the way that
*you* imagined, rather than someone else in Silicon Valley?  I think there is
something powerful in the idea of having something where you feel that you are
the one who has total ownership and control of how it works.

I'll have to give your idea some more thought... I know that this is somthing
that you've mentioned before.  The challenge might be to bring back that sense
of ownership to the experience, while also retaining ( or perhaps even
enhancing ) the abiltiy to share components between our images.

- les