totally new to squeak
Alan Kay
Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Sat Oct 20 17:07:47 UTC 2001
Hi --
The basic idea is "A Personal Computer for Children of all Ages".
In the sixties, we were some of the first people (a) who started
thinking about programming in "objects" instead of data structures
and procedures, and (b) working and playing on "personal computers"
instead of mainframes. When we saw LOGO (a nifty little language for
kids based on LISP and JOSS) we thought it would be pretty darn neat
if you could make an object-oriented language that a child could
learn that was also powerful enough to write its own OS. If you made
it late-bound (like LISP) then all code and other objects in the
system could always be inspected and changed. This worked out pretty
well.
In Squeak, we have some of these ideas updated to contemporary
computers. Squeak is its own OS. There is a large part that is
programmable by children. It runs on dozens of platfroms
"bit-identically". There is quite a bit of self-contained media,
including various kinds of 2.5D bit-map and vector graphics, a full
3D system; quite a bit of sound media, including a MIDI player and
editor, sampling and FM synthesis, FFT analysers, etc., and
collaboration via: DnD of objects to other Squeaks, email, shared
screens, and publishing of "full media" "Squeak plugin" "web-pages";
Squeak can act as a server, or a plugin, or run standalone, etc.
All this stuff is visible in the Squeaks that are downloadable from
the Squeak.org site. There are supposed to be 3 somewhat overlapping
authoring environments, that differ mainly by how much of the
resources and details the enduser sees. The reality today is that
only the children's and expert environments are actually usable.
* The expert environment is what the people on this list are
concerned with, and there is quite a bit of stuff written, look at
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/ There are also several books
about this level of Squeak ...
* The young kids environment has its own website
http://squeakland.org and there is the start of html accessable hints
and tuturials on http://squeakland.org/super/200
Now if we could just get the whole gig documented ..... (not to
mention get some of the rough edges rounded off ...)
Cheers,
Alan
-----
At 12:15 PM +0200 10/20/02, compufriend wrote:
>Hi
>i'm so new to squeak, i'm not even sure how comprehensive a tool it
>is. where does it's limits lie as far as programming just about any
>app? Is squeak just about writting training progs for kids that is
>suppose to be interactive? If i'm looking for a real, true BEGINNERS
>tutorial, click here to do this and then there because of that
>style, where can i go to find?
>
>MaRaudEr
--
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