[Edu-sig] Alan Kay - another one of his ideas

[Guido van Rossum]

On 7/12/06, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > I have no argument with the rest of your message but I want to stop
> > the rhetoric claiming that the WWW is somehow bad for us.
>
> Heck, no. I didn't mean to say that the web is "bad" for you (as in "TV
> is bad for you"). Limited, yes, and that is the point. Even on my very
> first home computer in the early 80s (Comodore C16) I had a drawing
> program.

There we go again. You are surrounded by geeks so obviously you don't
realize this any more, but do you have *any* idea how privileged you
were to have a computer in the early 80s?

> On the "web-platform" it effectively took ten years and two
> dozen standards until we've been able to recreate something as
> dog-simple as that.

You're comparing apples and oranges. People can still do whatever you
did on that C16 if they have a PC at home, no WWW needed. And there
are a lot more PCs and they are a lot cheaper. The WWW is just icing
on the cake.

> And the nature of the discourse simply changes
> dramatically when you have capable authoring tools at your hand to
> express your thoughts - one of the best examples being the Blogosphere
> which has managed to utilize the current limited authoring abilities in
> an amazing way.

Why do you keep referring to blogs as limited? They are a 1000x more
versatile and accessible than the word processors of the 80s and 90s.
You seem to be forgetting that.

> Anyway. I think this discussion is somewhat of a red herring so let's
> not get all locked up about whether the web's good or bad or whether it
> is too limited or "just right".

I'm all for wanting to improve the web. I just don't accept the claim
that it's somehow a regression.

What's a regression is that schools no longer teach programming. That
trend was apparent even before the web; programming classes (only
offered to very few students of course) have been replaced by
atrocities like "using Word" and "using PowerPoint" (offered to many
more students). Part of this may be due to the teachers -- there
simply aren't enough teachers capable of teaching programming the way
Alan Kay or his favorite teachers teach it...

> To get back to the Logowiki starting point, the main idea of Logowiki is
> to give people an example for what it *could* mean to include this kind
> of dynamic content in browser. The way I understand it, Crunchy Frog
> seems to be aimed very much in the same direction.

I've had a hard time finding the exact software that was used here. I
found a Squeak installer that was supposed to run in my browser but
didn't install correctly on my PowerBook. Could you publish some
fool-proof URLs for people to experiment with?

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)