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@ece.gatech.edu Mail Code 0250 Web: users.ece.gatech.edu/~lanterma Atlanta, GA 30332 Office: GCATT 334B