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You are correct regarding the initial concept, but what were the objectives of the Learning Resource Group that Alan Kay was leading at the time? And what were

by blihp 8y ago

You are correct regarding the initial concept, but what were the objectives of the Learning Resource Group that Alan Kay was leading at the time? And what were the various iterations of Smalltalk (i.e. -72 through -80) working towards? Squeak? Etoys? Croquet? (etc.) Alan has been pretty explicit in every paper and presentation I've seen from him: his career has been very much focused on computing as it applied to childhood education and development.[1] Of course Smalltalk is also an incredibly powerful language and still one of the better ones for adults to use IMO. But when push came to shove, the language design decisions were at least biased toward, if not explicitly based on what would work for children. [1] Which is both profound and enlightened because in the same breath he'll say he didn't really care about educating children... he just wanted to help make better adults.

mpweiher 8y ago
"Although Smalltalk-80 is not meant to be used by children, application programs can be written that will allow them to be creative and, at the same time, learn about programming." Is the Smalltalk- System for Children?, Byte, 6(8), August 1981. 3. Adele Goldberg , Steven T. Abell , David Leibs https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
- blihp 8y ago
  Keep in mind that was at a time when Adele was working to commercialize Smalltalk in the real world[1] eventually as a business venture selling to businesses (i.e. ParcPlace Systems) so there was more than a little bit of spin involved. (especially given the writing, photo and video evidence to the contrary from the 70's with Adele in-frame :-) Also, look back at the Early History link from your first post and you'll find 'children' mentioned 35 times including this quote: 'and a language I now called "Smalltalk"—as in "programming should be a matter of ..." and "children should program in ..."' [1] If I'm not mistaken the only reason Squeak and its derivatives even exist today was that during this time, as Xerox was trying to figure out what to do with what PARC produced, Apple received one of the handful of the Smalltalk-80 Version 1 licenses. IIRC, the Version 2 license was more restrictive and wouldn't have let Apple do what it did in terms of open sourcing Smalltalk. Notice that there was never a Smalltalk-82 etc... virtually all future work came from the commercial side until Squeak came along.
  - mpweiher 8y ago
    >> "Although Smalltalk-80 is not meant to be used by children..." > spin So when the people involved directly und unambiguously contradict your opinion, for which you have presented zero evidence, they are lying. When I looked at Smalltalk in 1975, I was looking at something great, but I did not see an enduser language, I did not see a solution to the original goal of a "reading" and "writing" computer medium for children. That's Alan in Early History. > 'children' mentioned 35 times That's an odd metric at best, but let's play. First mention of "children" after the introduction: A month later, I finally visited Seymour Papert, Wally Feurzig, Cynthia Solomon and some of the other original researchers who had built LOGO and were using it with children in the Lexington schools. Here were children doing real programming with a specially designed language and environment. Hmm..LOGO. What's LOGO? Logo is a multi-paradigm adaptation and dialect of Lisp, [..] The goal was to create a mathematical land where children could play with words and sentences Oh, and LISP is mentioned 29 times. Having read this document many times, as well as the History papers and listened to talks etc., I have yet to find any evidence that anything was done to "dumb down" Smalltalk in order to make it work for children. Quite the contrary: One of the basic insights I had gotten from Seymour was that you didn't have to do a lot to make a computer an "object for thought" for children, but what you did had to be done well and be able to apply deeply. This incident and others like it made paramount that any tool for children should have great thinking patterns and deep beauty "built-in." Shortly after that: As I mentioned previously, it was annoying that the surface beauty of LISP was marred by some of its key parts having to be introduced as "special forms" rather than as its supposed universal building block of functions. The actual beauty of LISP came more from the promise of its metastructures than its actual model. By this time [Smalltalk-80] I was both happy about the cleanliness and elegance of the Smalltalk conception as realized by Dan and the others, and sad that it was farther away than ever from the children

by blihp 8y ago

mpweiher 8y ago

"Although Smalltalk-80 is not meant to be used by children, application programs can be written that will allow them to be creative and, at the same time, learn about programming." Is the Smalltalk- System for Children?, Byte, 6(8), August 1981. 3. Adele Goldberg , Steven T. Abell , David Leibs https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

blihp 8y ago
Keep in mind that was at a time when Adele was working to commercialize Smalltalk in the real world[1] eventually as a business venture selling to businesses (i.e. ParcPlace Systems) so there was more than a little bit of spin involved. (especially given the writing, photo and video evidence to the contrary from the 70's with Adele in-frame :-) Also, look back at the Early History link from your first post and you'll find 'children' mentioned 35 times including this quote: 'and a language I now called "Smalltalk"—as in "programming should be a matter of ..." and "children should program in ..."' [1] If I'm not mistaken the only reason Squeak and its derivatives even exist today was that during this time, as Xerox was trying to figure out what to do with what PARC produced, Apple received one of the handful of the Smalltalk-80 Version 1 licenses. IIRC, the Version 2 license was more restrictive and wouldn't have let Apple do what it did in terms of open sourcing Smalltalk. Notice that there was never a Smalltalk-82 etc... virtually all future work came from the commercial side until Squeak came along.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  >> "Although Smalltalk-80 is not meant to be used by children..." > spin So when the people involved directly und unambiguously contradict your opinion, for which you have presented zero evidence, they are lying. When I looked at Smalltalk in 1975, I was looking at something great, but I did not see an enduser language, I did not see a solution to the original goal of a "reading" and "writing" computer medium for children. That's Alan in Early History. > 'children' mentioned 35 times That's an odd metric at best, but let's play. First mention of "children" after the introduction: A month later, I finally visited Seymour Papert, Wally Feurzig, Cynthia Solomon and some of the other original researchers who had built LOGO and were using it with children in the Lexington schools. Here were children doing real programming with a specially designed language and environment. Hmm..LOGO. What's LOGO? Logo is a multi-paradigm adaptation and dialect of Lisp, [..] The goal was to create a mathematical land where children could play with words and sentences Oh, and LISP is mentioned 29 times. Having read this document many times, as well as the History papers and listened to talks etc., I have yet to find any evidence that anything was done to "dumb down" Smalltalk in order to make it work for children. Quite the contrary: One of the basic insights I had gotten from Seymour was that you didn't have to do a lot to make a computer an "object for thought" for children, but what you did had to be done well and be able to apply deeply. This incident and others like it made paramount that any tool for children should have great thinking patterns and deep beauty "built-in." Shortly after that: As I mentioned previously, it was annoying that the surface beauty of LISP was marred by some of its key parts having to be introduced as "special forms" rather than as its supposed universal building block of functions. The actual beauty of LISP came more from the promise of its metastructures than its actual model. By this time [Smalltalk-80] I was both happy about the cleanliness and elegance of the Smalltalk conception as realized by Dan and the others, and sad that it was farther away than ever from the children