[Edu-sig] The keyhole problem and learning environments

[kirby urner]

On 7/14/06, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't get the impression Alan Kay is leading the Smalltalk community
> anymore.  He told us at the summit that he's a SmallTalk slayer.

This interview, well over a year old, seems consistent with a lot of
the stuff I heard Alan saying in person (this is a printed interview):
http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273

He talks about his hope that SmallTalk would be superseded as early as
the early 1980s (he started seeing it as obsolete as early as the
1970s).  But for various reasons this didn't happen.  He blames the
spread of a pop culture around computing that outstripped the true
church's ability to maintain quality.  The average IQ of computer
science as a discipline, went down.  High culture became mediocre
culture.

Of course it's an exaggeration to say no one even *cares* about
SmallTalk, even if we agree it's somewhat on the dead side.  I met
some highly paid FORTRAN compiler optimizers at OSCON last year.  Many
critical and important applications are still in COBOL as well.  Dead
languages have their devotees.  There's really no shame in using dead
languages (even caring about them).

Here's an article from 2005 reassuring us the SmallTalk *isn't* dead.
But I don't think this is as reflective of Alan's thinking.  He's
still looking to liberate and empower children, using the latest and
greatest deep insights.  The life of the professional programmer,
doing adult things like container shipping, is not his priority.

http://www.whysmalltalk.com/2005_04_03_archive.html

Anyway, that's just my reading.  The guy can speak for himself,
obviously, and does so, all over the Internet (back to Googling...).

Kirby