Thanks for your feedback Lex. I get into that with HCI*. You almost read my mind about variables. You have to learn it !!!! How can that be overcome or should it ? People have their own fields of learning, maybe learning computing on top of that is inconvenient ???
Libraries is great,as I understand, that is one thing that makes Squeak a good meta language.
*(diverging a lot, I argue with myself a bit about man-computer symbiosis.There is a symbiosis, there isn't a symbiosis :). Soon after reading it,thankfully, I read the Smalltalk paper, to serve the creative spirit, which sounds kinder. Man can do without computers, they just help him control his world) Thanks, Gary
"Gary McGovern" zeppy@australia.edu wrote:
Can anyone say what the highest level languages will end up like. I like tiling but, I think there is something else. I think what I've used in Squeak might fall a bit short but I cannot quite put muy finger on it.
I think drawing think drwing on the screen is the end - but how to
script
it , program it I think is still a problem.
I don't know about the hard question. That is wonderful to think about, however. Roughly, I think of (a) having lots of convenient *libraries* around, and (b) I think of having my algorithms being effortless to encode for someone who is experienced with the system. Oh, and (c), I suppose there will be a major language where non-experienced people can still struggle along and make useful things happen. This latter one would include lots of friendly graphics and lots of drag and drop and lots of feedback from the tool. But more specifically? I have no idea.
A few notes, however.
The available libraries in a language are an important topic that is often overlooked. If you want to make a "simple" web server it could require ten lines of code or a thousand, depending only on whether you have a web server handy in your library. The library gives you the words that your language can use.
It is misguided to try and make all tasks accessible to completely inexperienced people. I don't think you should need a college degree to do most programming on computers. But, like driving a car or making waffles, people should expect to spend some time on it before internalizing it. This trend in HCI really bothers me. You shouldn't have to study (much) to use a toaster, but a VCR really is complex enough that it requires some thought and -- yes -- study of some sort to even understand what it is doing. Likewise, for computer programming. Make it easy for people who know what a variable is or who know that tapes hold recorded video, but if you don't understand variables and don't understand what a video is, you need to put in some study time. Sure, build the tutorial into the interface if you want, but at some point the user really needs to put the brain in gear.
Finally, don't blow off text. Text is very powerful both for people and for tool implementors, and so IMHO it should only be abandoned when you are working on the extreme edges of non-studying users. People learn Smalltalk syntax in a day or less, and Smalltalk syntax is enough to do practically anything. Non-programmers do all kinds of things with spreadsheets (or, maybe they are programmers now). So don't obsess over the text. Heck, even Squeak's etoys are using tiles *to build sentences*.
-Lex
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