[squeak-dev] [ANN] Koans for Teaching the Basics of Smalltalk

Lawson English lenglish5 at cox.net
Tue Dec 13 21:36:53 UTC 2011


That sounds really great.

However, there are some broken bits in Squeak that will make learning 
Smalltalk difficult.

Most simple and important example I have right now is the well-known 
issue that the VM will freeze indefinitely if you input a long running 
calculation, e.g. x := 100000 factorial. The interrupt key doesn't work, 
usually.  Newbies like me, like to experiment, and if the VM freezes 
with every typo, then its hardly worth using.

That is the feedback I'm getting from my videos.

L.

On 12/13/11 8:31 AM, Michael Perscheid wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> it's a pleasure for me to announce the Koans tutorial project for teaching beginners the basics of Smalltalk. Inspired by the Edgecase Ruby Koans project and the original "The little Lisper" book by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, we have implemented Smalltalk Koans in order to help our students to get started with Smalltalk.
>
> Smalltalk Koans will guide you as a Smalltalk novice from first steps in Smalltalk to your first small project. The path is simple: You get a task, you solve it and, in the process, learn something. The Koans Sensei (jap.: teacher) will be your guide and introduce you to fundamental concepts in Smalltalk such as strings, blocks, collections and many more.
>
> After a first internal use, we'd like to announce that we make this tutorial project available for the community.
>
> https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/trac/SqueakCommunityProjects/wiki/smalltalk_koans
>
> Especially, we'd like to acknowledge our student assistants, Eric Seckler, Robin Schreiber, and Partick Rein for implementing Koans in Smalltalk.
>
> If you have any wishes for new lectures and feedback to existing ones, please let us know.
>
> Best regards,
> Michael
>




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