[squeak-dev] Are Objects really hard?

Gary Dunn garydunnhi at gmail.com
Mon Feb 13 19:35:10 UTC 2012


On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Nicolas Cellier
<nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are you so sure the ideas behind Smalltalk were not primarily that of
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionist_learning ?
>
> Nicolas
>
> 2012/2/11 Chris Cunnington <smalltalktelevision at gmail.com>:
>> "...Yet I think Smalltalk still fundamentally failed (remember this is a
>> programming language originally designed to scale from children to
>> adults) because *Objects are really hard* and no-one really understands
>> to this day how to do them right...."
>>
>>
>> I don't think Smalltalk was designed for children. After the fact, after
>> they had
>> designed something they were meant to design, they intended to weld it to
>> they most noble cause they could find. I think it's historically inaccurate
>> to say
>> Smalltalk was designed for children. I think like a lot of things, like
>> Croquet,
>> people follow their muse and create something beautiful. Then they try to
>> find a purpose for it.
>>
>> So Smalltalk is not a failure because it was designed for children. Because
>> it wasn't designed for children. And if you look a the intent of helping
>> children with computers, the OLPC looks like a success to me.
>>
>> This fellow doesn't seem to distinguish between Smalltalk and OOP. OOP
>> is a success. It's everywhere. Lots of people do it, so how hard can it be?
>>
>> I always feel people who try to talk this way about Smalltalk are trying to
>> invalidate the fun I'm having with the language, because it's not popular
>> and it's not making people rich. As far as I'm concerned, this guy's close
>> to telling me how I'm supposed to be having sex.
>>
>> The funniest part of his saying Smalltalk failed (qualified with a
>> "fundamentally"
>> of course. Another loose, imprecise use of the English language IMHO) is
>> that seven
>> years ago, when I bought Squeak: Learn Programming With Robots, this fellow
>> had
>> never heard of the Smalltalk. Now he's blogging about. Say what you will,
>> our balloon
>> rises to greater visibility with every passing year.
>>
>> Chris

I know there were a lot of comments on this thread, and I have no
intention of addressing them all. I do have two things to say.

1. Anyone who writes with such emotionally charged, opinionated
language about JavaScript is unlikely to write anything of interest to
me. Reminds me of ESPN commentators, who manage to make a bad call
sound like a cause for WWIII, a shallow ploy designed to attract
attention to themselves.

2. The debate over Smalltalk and children is pointless. History shows
clearly that Kay was devoted to bringing automation tools to
education, not as subject of study (see: computer lab) but as a tool
that takes the place of textbooks and libraries, and that he
envisioned Smalltalk as the environment students would use on the
Dynabook. Even if he concieved of the language on a bet, he was
already thinking in the context of education, and when he saw what he
made he realized that it fit well into his vision. Later, when the
Smalltalk developers realized that the current implementation missed
the mark, they pushed the design into a new OOP model, which brought
us Squeak, morphic, and Etoys.

One more quickie. I offer that Smalltalk, as in Squeak, has not been a
smashing success due to the formidable challenge of changing the
course of the education system. I can think of few things more
entrenched and fearful of change. Papert ran smack into this, as he
describes in his book "The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in
the Age of the Computer."

-- 
Gary Dunn
Honolulu


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