On 30.06.2009, at 04:23, Ramon Leon wrote:

>>>> Or, at the contrary: let them experience a big shock that wipes  
>>>> out their
>>>> preconceived ideas about programming. Trying to help them avoid  
>>>> that shock
>>>> may actually make thing more difficult for them in the long term.  
>>>> They have
>>>> to grok that Smalltalk *is* different.
>>>
>>> 30 years of big shock have proved not to work.
>>
>> Um, maybe I'm just missing something, but which part didn't work? ;-)
>> Dave
>
> How about the part where Smalltalk gets enough mainstream acceptance
> that it's used as much as Python or Ruby and thousands of developers
> are writing libraries for it instead of a small handful?  How about
> enough that when you tell someone you're using Smalltalk that they've
> actually have heard of it and know what you're talking about?  Let's
> not act like there isn't room for improvement and that we wouldn't
> benefit from a larger community of fresh blood to take the place of
> the old gray bearded Smalltalker's before they all die.


How about getting them young, when the kids are not yet brain-washed  
into how a "proper" edit-compile-run-crash development environment  
looks like? Say, by making a cool shiny toy environment that lets them  
start to play, and once they reach its limits, show them how to open  
the hood and program actual Smalltalk? That toy environment could  
initially be developed by a handful of engineers, but it would need a  
whole community to keep it up-to-date and make it truly useful for  
"grownup" tasks too. Now there's an idea ...

- Bert -