Complexity and starting over on the JVM

Paul D. Fernhout pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com
Fri Feb 8 13:25:31 UTC 2008


tim Rowledge wrote:
>> So, it's not enough for you to succeed. Everyone else must fail?
> Well of course! I was always taught that if you can't be the best by
> being very good, be the best by being the only survivor.

This isn't meant personally, but I can wonder if this study applies to the
Squeak community as a whole: :-)
  "How Not to Talk to Your Kids"
  http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/  [multiple pages]
"Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised
by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable
that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in
control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of
the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a
failure.” In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think
that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the
importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to
put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized -- it’s public proof
that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts. Repeating her experiments,
Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of
every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls -- the very brightest
girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even
preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise. ... Dweck’s
research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that *image maintenance*
becomes their primary concern — they are more competitive and more
interested in tearing others down. ... Life Sciences is a health-science
magnet school with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes
are being predominantly minority and low achieving. Blackwell split her kids
into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was taught
study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how
intelligence is not innate. These students took turns reading aloud an essay
on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the
brain and acted out skits. “Even as I was teaching these ideas,” Blackwell
noted, “I would hear the students joking, calling one another ‘dummy’ or
‘stupid.’ ” After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her students’
grades to see if it had any effect. It didn’t take long. The teachers—who
hadn’t known which students had been assigned to which workshop—could pick
out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed.
They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell
reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math grades. The only
difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a
total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the
brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone
improved their math scores." [my emphasis]

If people talked about Squeak as "getting better all the time" and requiring
continual investments of hard work to continue to improve then it might be
easier to learn from what makes Java or Python as successful as they are
(rather than just dismiss them), even if those languages do miss out on many
of Smalltalk great-for-the-time ideas.

But instead we have:
  http://www.squeak.org/
"Squeak is ... modern, open source full-featured .. easy ..."
when underscore is used archaically, the license still isn't approved by
OSI, and it is missing an easy to use GUI for beginners. I'm not saying this
statement on the web site is a total lie, but it is a matter of *degree*.
This is maybe fine to tell other people as hype, but when you start
believing it yourself as an absolute, as the study above shows, it can lead
to "image maintenance becomes their primary concern" [double entendre
intended.] :-)

Anyway, it's been an interesting bunch of replies from everyone, thanks, and
helped me understated some of the Squeak community's current feelings about
several things a bit better.

--Paul Fernhout







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