[Squeakland] Squeak and EE

[Aaron Lanterman]

Dear Kim and Assorted Central Squeakers,

> In the meantime, we'd love your feedback on the experiences you had
> this school year and we wish you all a marvelous summer!

I'm an assistant professor of ECE at Georgia Tech; I'm starting my fourth
year this Fall. One of the main courses I teach is ECE2025, which is our
introductory course in EE, taken mostly by sophomores. It uses the text
"Signal Processing First" (formerly "DSP First"), and makes heavy use of
Matlab. The students have weekly labs in Matlab, and I myself have used
Matlab almost exclusively for the past six years.

Mark Guzdial, over in our College of Computing, introduced me to Squeak,
and I'm absolutely fascinated. I'm interested in maybe using it to rig up
real-time demos of DSP concepts, and I have an undergrad working with me
on an independent study in this direction.

I have the smallest of suggestions, which might actually have a big
impact: include complex numbers and assorted operations (and make them
play nicely and consistently with the rest of the Squeak numeric
structure) as part of the base image in the next release.

This may seem silly, as one can of course write a complex number handling
package without much difficulty, and there are several to download on the
web. But having it right there as part of the image would make it a much
easier "sell" to my colleages. If I need 4+2j in Squeak, it would be nice
to just have it ready to go out of the box.

It may also sound silly, but if it doesn't have complex numbers built in,
then a lot of the EE world won't take it seriously. Many of my elder
colleagues still cling to Fortran instead of going to another language for
that very reason (sad, sad).

If you include it, They will come.

- Aaron

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Dr. Aaron Lanterman, Asst. Prof.       Voice:  404-385-2548
School of Electrical and Comp. Eng.    Fax:    404-894-8363
Georgia Institute of Technology        E-mail: lanterma at ece.gatech.edu
Mail Code 0250                         Web:    users.ece.gatech.edu/~lanterma
Atlanta, GA 30332                      Office: GCATT 334B