[Squeakland] Alan Kay's EuroPython Keynote

Fri Jul 7 06:27:29 PDT 2006

Hi all,

I would like to use this chance to talk about some questions regarding 
the OLPC project and Squeak. In my own short experience teaching, there 
is nothing like Squeak for teaching programming (even for not so young 
children like myself and my university students). Is fun, is connected 
with the world, is media rich. It was pretty amazing for me to find that 
Squeak would not be included in OLPC. I liked a lot python also and I 
have had rewarding experiences using it as a first programming language, 
but Squeak works better in a heterogeneous teaching environment. So here 
come my questions:

 * ¿Why was not Squeak included in the OLPC project?

 * I have heard that in Argentina the laptops would work with Utoto, a 
local distro there. So, if Fedora Distro is not a "must be" and Laptops 
can be "located", ¿could we create a program to "enrich" OLPC original 
offering with Squeak?

 * In my experience Squeak is in some way, too much self contained: it 
has his own file manganer (no problem here) but has no drag & drop from 
graphical file managers in Unix (not even for the ones which support XDD 
XDesktop standard), no "bindings" with other languages (one of the 
success of python is the possibility to use easily C++ or Java code with 
Python), etc. ¿Would be possible to have some kind of Spytalk (or 
Pytalk) that makes for the relation Squeak-Python what Jython makes for 
the Java-Python relationship?, would be nice to have the possibility to 
write python inside squeak, or to extend/mix Smalltalk code with python 
one, for example in etoys. Making a bridge between Squeak and Python, we 
could to take advantage of the python mind share, without loosing the 
Squeak power ¿Is this much difficult? (may be the answer is "yes" :-/ ).

Cheers,

Offray

Markus Gaelli escribió:
> On Jul 7, 2006, at 12:46 AM, Brad Fuller wrote:
>   
>> Serge Stinckwich wrote:
>>     
>>> There is a report of Guido Van Rossum about an Alan Kay talk in his
>>> web log here : http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp? 
>>> thread=167318
>>>
>>>       
>> this is sad to read:
>>
>> Alan believes that Python has a much larger mindshare than  
>> Smalltalk or
>> Squeak, and that because of this a similar environment in Python will
>> have a greater chance of succeeding than the current Squeak one. Also,
>> the $100 laptop already has Python, and Alan is of course hoping  
>> that a
>> Squeak-like environment will be part of it, so this appears expedient.
>> (At the Shuttleworth summit in April
>> <http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=156162> I believe
>> Alan also suggested that Squeak is suffering from its extremely simple
>> graphics model; apparently it cannot benefit from graphics accelerator
>> cards because of its platform-independent architecture. Python on the
>> other hand already has bindings to OpenGL and DirectX, for example.)
>>
>> -- 
>> brad
>> sonaural
>>
>>
>>     
>
> Hi folks,
>
> let's be proud that Smalltalk was indispensable to come up with Etoys  
> and let us accept the challenge.
>
> I googled for python IDEs today and found
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments
> and there the most up to date IDE shootout of
> http://spyced.blogspot.com/2005/09/review-of-6-python-ides.html
> and
> http://spyced.blogspot.com/2006/02/pycon-python-ide-review.html
>
> I have to say that I was not impressed.
>
> The IDEs were either not free: Wing, Komodo and in the future PyDev
> based on Qt (Eric4)
> had no liberal license (Gnu! ): SPE
> couldn't eat their own dog food as they were based on Java: PyDev
> or didn't have convincing screenshots: DrPython
>
> Alan, which python IDE would you suggest us to widen our perspectives  
> for ourselves, the job market and for helping to make the world a  
> better place - if it is not Squeak?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Markus
>
> p.s. another blog about Alan's talk can be found on
> http://vanrees.org/weblog/archive/2006/07/03/europython-keynote-alan- 
> kay-children-first
>
> p.p.s. inspired by Paul Bissex - a guy who once wrote a small article  
> about squeak for Wired - challenge on:
> http://e-scribe.com/news/193
> I wrote an Etoys version of this "reverse"-game.
> It can be found on
> http://www.squeakland.org/project.jsp?http://www.emergent.de/pub/ 
> smalltalk/squeak/projects/reverse.pr
>
> (I hope you all have the squeakland plugin installed... ;-) )
>
> It has only a few lines more than the smalltalk (I  included a  
> smalltalk version), python, ruby,... version but comes with a much  
> more sophisticated user interface.
> So I do think that Etoys are the way to go... no matter what the  
> language is underneath - be it smalltalk/python/ruby/etc...
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>
>   

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