That Other Use for Squeak

Mark Guzdial guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Jul 5 14:03:51 UTC 2000


At 10:19 AM +0200 7/4/00, Marcel Weiher wrote:
>Somehow I missed that one, a really great post!

Thanks!

>Yes!  It is a simple rule-based system, pattern -> action.  Of
>course, OO-dispatch is an even *simpler* rule-based system, and with
>even a simple meta-object protocol, OO-dispatch could be extended for
>some classes to naturally handle awk-like pattern matching.
>
>Use a pattern as the 'selector', and have the class's custom
>dispatcher (a) match incoming messages (encoded as strings) using
>pattern matching instead of equality and (b) parse out the arguments.
> Voila, Squawk!
>
>Wouldn't it be neat if you could teach Squawk instead of Awk?  The
>students get something that's just as easy as Awk at the start, but
>already have a leg up on full Squeak-power if they ever encounter
>problems that basic Squawk cannot deal with, or simply have other
>computing needs as well.

Absolutely!  That's why we need a meta-programming layer on Squeak 
that allows Sqawk, Sqrolog, and other badly named languages (:-) to 
be easily created!

>Yes!  Motivation really *is* everything.  (Well almost...).  Give
>people really rich objects, not just to play with, but to accomplish
>something that's useful for them.  This goes for business people just
>as much as for children.
>
>Another point is power.  I think it is a myth that 'scripting'
>languages should be less powerful than general purpose languages.  If
>anything, they need much greater power in order to represent a
>reasonable effort/achievement tradeoff for people who don't really
>want to program but just accomplish a goal.

Agreed!  The issue of motivation is really a cost-benefit analysis: 
Does my motivation for the benefit outweigh the cost?  For HyperCard, 
the benefit was raised up (beyond languages like C and Pascal) so 
people paid the cost that hadn't previously.  In Logo, the cost is 
lowered so that kids are willing to get started with programming.  I 
think that Squeak has enormous benefits that people want (Web 
programming, multimedia, etc.), so if we lower the cost (including 
docs and books, besides new and easier styles of starting with 
programming), we can improve the motivation to jump in.

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html





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