I have a suggestion for future Smalltalk advocates...
The advent of Pi Zero last month is an interesting opportunity. This is a very, very cheap Raspberry Pi. Anyone can afford it. I'm thinking of kids, in particular.
What if we could get kids to delve into Squeak or Pharo (Squeak is better optimized for Raspberry Pi) via the Pi Zero? A competition could be set up in various countries, such as Canada, Britain, Australia, Japan, etc., where the best student submission for a Smalltalk-based Pi Zero application would win a small scholarship prize (say, $500). A panel of judges in each country would decide the winner.
The contest would be much less ambitious than my now-defunct Canadian Smalltalk Competition https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520902870/canadian-smalltalk-competition (CSC). Less control (no real need to prevent cheating). Easier to raise the prize money. The nice thing is that it would be a multi-national promotion (it's tough getting a national school competition like CSC going in other countries).
Of course, because it's less ambitious, we can expect to reach fewer kids. Instead of thousands, probably more like hundreds. I could be totally wrong on this; I could be totally surprised!
I might even come out of retirement https://medium.com/@richardeng/today-is-the-first-anniversary-of-smalltalk-renaissance-b4bd0c43538c to offer some creative services (eg, promotional graphics, websites, etc.). 😁
Anyway, it was just an interesting thought I had. Don't know if it stands up to scrutiny.
Cheers, Richard
Richard Eng wrote on Tue, 22 Dec 2015 06:11:12 -0500
I have a suggestion for future Smalltalk advocates... [Squeak and Raspberry Pi contest idea]
One problem is that the standard Linux distributions (including those optimized for the Pi) don't include a complete Squeak (or Pharo). An option would be to create a new distribution just for such a contest. In fact, it could be an extremely stripped down Linux focused exclusively on running Squeak (like Dan Ingalls did for his weather station). One advantage of that is that the boot time would be much smaller than what people are used to. The only thing better than that would be SqueakNOS, which would be a lot more work.
-- Jecel
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