At Thu, 29 Nov 2001 09:01:37 +0100, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
We might continue this list for years. ZX81 emulators (they exist, sure, see the pages of XTender...). A program which computes the mileage of your mouse, all kind of silly text scramblers, etc. I could give you some hundreds of such "goodies". So why do I bother you with that? Because ALL COMP. SCI TEACHERS in this best of worlds are *obliged* to produce either directly, or through their students such wonderful pieces of software. Their purpose may be just training. We teach compilation and virtual machines. Well, now, be more ambitious, and do something which works, even if it is silly. Now I have two students who code Lindenmayer systems in Squeak. Perfectly useless as well. But
- They will learn Smalltalk.
- They will learn how to process quasi-paralelly a highly recursive data structure.
Sure! I change this year my CS1 course from functional programming (with Ocaml) to OOP (with Squeak) and last year my students have done some work on a Lindenmayer system project. This year, i would like to do the same project with Squeak.