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

[Andreas Raab]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 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?

In what way is this relevant for our discussion? Unless you want me to 
pretend that prior art doesn't exist, I don't see much relevance in that 
observation ;-)

[But just to answer your question: Yes I have a pretty good idea about 
it, simply because at the time and place it was pointed out to me over 
and over and over again]

>> 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.

I am not comparing apples and oranges, I am comparing platforms. And 
that last statement shows precisely where we differ. I don't look at the 
web as just icing on the cake, to me it's not a supplementary medium. To 
me it's the whole deal, a platform in and of its own. And when you 
compare the platforms, the web (maybe with a PC terminal for access) and 
my C16 you'll find pretty quickly there are lots of things that you 
can't do on the web. Just go into one of them Internet-Cafes and try 
installing some software of your own choosing. Or, even worse, try this 
in a corporate or school setting. You'll notice quickly that you don't 
have a platform - you have a terminal and the web is the platform.

>> 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.

Peace. I said "limited authoring capabilities" and given that even today 
most blog hosting services offer little more than an input field for 
writing HTML code I think I can defend that position ;-)

>> 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.

That's because you are comparing Apples and Oranges, and I am comparing 
platforms.

> 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...

Needless to say: I agree.

>> 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?

I'm not sure which "exact software" you are referring to, we've been 
touching a couple of things in this discussion. For Logowiki, 
http://logowiki.net is the reference and there is no plugin required. 
For Squeak itself, there is Squeak.org which does not offer a webbrowser 
plugin installation. Our educational site, Squeakland.org offers such an 
install, see http://www.squeakland.org/plugin/download.html which is a 
custom Squeak version intended for use with eToys.

Cheers,
   - Andreas