> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martín Altobello [mailto:martin_altobello at yahoo.com.ar]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 12:19 PM
> To: Lista Squeak
> Subject: About SqueakRos News
> 
> 
> Greetings and Salutations,
>  
> I am writing you from Rosario city, Argentina (you may have heard of us in
> CNN - yes, the country that had 5 presidents in 15 days). As cracy as it may
> sound, "we" - a group of professors and graduate students from - so far -
> two different Universities have gotten together to create a research
> initiative. 

Why should this be crazy? I welcome this inititive! Important ressources
for research are curiosity, time and creativity. Why shoudn't this be
possible in Rosario?
  
> And thus, since last week, SqueakRos is born: A Smalltalk/Squeak research
> initiative, made of people who have the Object Oriented Paradigm in the
> heart. 
>  

[snip]

> Though because of the current situation of our country we are having some
> difficulties in getting official support from our Faculties - the
> Universidad Abierta InterAmericana,  Facultad de Tecnología Informática, and
> the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, sede Regional Rosario - we hope that
> for the next year (and more!) we will be researching Squeak and its basts
> posibilities, aiming to developt an easy to use and at hand spanish
> documentation. 

I consider it to be a good idea to begin with a good on-line course (for
example on web pages which can be read in Scamper and directly
and executed). And I think there even would be people interested 
in translating the course for example into German (100 mio speakers) or 
French and probably English as well - there is not yet a comprehensive
on-line course yet. I even remember Stephane Ducasse writing of a
Smalltalk course for students in Burkina Faso he is thinking of.
(They probably have older computers and often not even power!)

The books published on Squeak so far are more directed to 
giving some impressions, hints and ideas. They are not comprehensive. 
I think electronic media is better then a book for doing this. 
Smalltalk has always suffered a bit from the lack of enough actually
running application code examples. I sometimes have the impression
that the people on this list (me included) are even somewhat reluctant
of actually using Squeak. Perhaps it has do to with the perception
that there are still many bugs and one has got used to the idea
that many things don't really work while not realizing that in the
meantime an incredible amount of things have been fixed and in many
areas things run very smoothly. It may have to do with the fact that
the focus of this list is to deal with things which are not working.
(which is good but interferes with the notion of using Squeak as
an application)

I imagine you are aware of the other Squeak initiatives in Argentina
(MorphicWrappers etc.) 

> As time goes on, we aspire to get inside Squeak and maybe even contribute in
> some way to its international comunity - whithin our own humble
> posibilities. 

Surely. There are vast untapped possibilites. For example today I tried
to get a Prolog interpreter running in Squeak - the concept is actually
very good and combinig it with Morphic would give interesting
possiblities. I had to find out that probably nobody really used it
for three years as the port does not even handle lists. Combining
Prolog - horn clause evaluation (Alain Colmerauer and Phillipe Roussel,
Marseille 1972) with Smalltalk (20 year old concept) with something
more recent (Morphic - 1 year old) would make something exciting.
Prolog is good for backward chaining and unification for the rests
it's really awkward. OK, there have been efforts as well in Paris
for doing expert systems directly in Smallalk.

I think for your work you don't even need many new books. Most of
the books are variations of the same things over and over anyway.
A lot of redundancy.

> On a personal note, I'd like to thank you all for making Squeak "free for
> everybody to use". Education is the best social "equalizer", and in times
> like this, in our country, education is all we have left. And the dream that
> one day our effords will lead to a better dignifying life. I believe Squeak
> is a great tool for archieving that. 

Yes I think this decision by the Squeak team and the responsibles at Apple 
and Disney to let them do this is really extraordinary!

> In previous ocassions I've written to this list with "personal questions".
> In the future I may be adressing you as a member of SqueakRos, with the
> group's questions and news. 

I'll be interested. Greetings from Zurich, Switzerland.


Saludos

Hannes Hirzel