Useless goodies (Was: XML Parser choice (was [ENH] ??? MD5 in Squeak.))

Jerzy Karczmarczuk karczma at info.unicaen.fr
Thu Nov 29 08:01:37 UTC 2001


Bijan Parsia :

> Duane Maxwell wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> > Hey! I resent that!  An Apple ][ emulator is *supremely* useless.
> >
> > In fact, I challenge anyone to come up with something else in Squeak less
> > useful.
> 
> Ok, I have a few IRC goodies:
> 
>         1) MorseIRC. Translates all incoming and outgoing messages to
>            morse code.
>         2) Er...I don't have a name for this, but ...

Now, now.
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 
1. They will learn Smalltalk.
2. They will learn how to process quasi-paralelly a highly recursive data
   structure.

So, I could even defend the ZX81 emulator, which has inside the Sinclair
floating-point calculator, whose architecture is a decently optimized
stack-based virtual machine, interesting. Etcaetera. 

Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list