On 8/6/2011 7:27 PM, Simon Forman wrote:
On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 2:48 AM, Alan Kay<[email protected]> wrote:
That was my thought when I first saw what Seymour Papert was doing with
children and LOGO in the 60s. I was thinking about going back into Molecular
Biology, but Seymour showed that computers could *really* be important as
unique vehicles for teaching "powerful ideas" and "powerful thinking" to
young children -- this was like a light going on.
I can believe it. So simple and so powerful.
There is more on this at http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php under the
category of "sorted by: Teaching and Learning Powerful Ideas"
Yeah, when I first found VPRI a couple of years ago I went nuts and
downloaded a dozen or so PDFs, implemented a simple COLA in Python,
etc.. I've been urging my [programmer] friends to take a look ever
since. (Sadly, with limited success.)
I ran into this a few years ago mostly due to someone else I knew.
then mostly lurked as there was a bit of a disconnect between the
discussions on here and what I was working on (my efforts are generally
a bit more conventional I think).
started writing more recently, mostly as more interesting topics seem to
be showing up.
earlier on (when I was newer to language/VM design), I was a little more
"out there", but ended up mostly normalizing on the "conventional track"
mostly as this is largely what ended up being most personally useful.
also, although not everyone likes mainstream languages, people seem to
generally agree a lot more on them than the wide range of love/hate
reactions and huge levels of variation one finds at the fringes (where a
few people adore a language, nearly everyone else thinks it is
ugly/nasty/broken/..., and where the languages often look and behave
nothing alike and have little or no standardization, ...).
nearer the center is far more generic. it is not "perfect" for really
anyone, but is "plenty good enough" for the majority.
I guess to each his own...
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