Hello, interesting post here ;-) I also ask myself many times on such considerations. It seems to me students are not more stupid than before. But...may be programming languages are "just" no more an issue nor an important (and so exciting) debate to consider ? Like having a car students need oopl and frameworks to fit what they have to do. They probably are no more interested with the most beautifull car, the most powerful engine, cool things that make the flame up...because they just need to travel 3 km and the driving limitations are here and we speak about environment constraints, blabla. They just need an oopl as they need a car. When the car is out or because the environment is changing, they change and they really know they will have to change many times and that's it...they have to cope with such changing situation and may be most of them don't want to pay for exciting things they don't really need for long time...the same for oopl isn't it ? Then it is difficult to be convinced to investigate in a specific (and not fully integrated) techno in a changing world. But, that does not mean that cars designers, engineers, researchers, constructors are deprecated jobs. I am sure that car designers are not driven to deliver the best car, and I am also sure that some of the engineers, designers think about cool cars, car prototypes with exciting features even if such cool cars and prototypes will never succeed and/or will be never sold.
So attracting new people may not be a so important issue (eumh)...but the idea behind pharo is that people continue to learn and progress in delivering and proposing cool things in a productive environment and that is a really attractive perspective. And pharo may probably influence future developments in other environments, frameworks, emerging future languages or/and dialects, etc. I am not sure that students are enthousiastics with the other technos they are obliged to use ! In fact they aren't. Herve On 30 déc. 2010, at 22:56, Stéphane Ducasse <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi guys > > I think that over the years I (but also many of you, I know) tried to expose > newbies to smalltalk or our culture. > And often we get bad reactions, bad windows, bad colors, slow, why not in > svn, ..... > I think that showing Smalltalk to newbies is the best we can do to ourselves, > not really to attract new people > but also to get a large kick in the %^&* because most of the time students > are not stupid, they are exposed to > other technos. So each time we believe we want to show them something cool > and they do not really > consider it as cool as we believe, we can of course think that they are idiot > (some of them are) but > most of the time we can also think that may be we stayed too long in our > little boxes and the world > moved (interfaced well with c, fast, cool frameworks, has cool tools, > processes (integration...), cool UIs, web stuff.....). > So each time we get down because we do not see the little flame opening in > the yes of the others > we can think hard and get from them what we missed. > > I really happy to get exposed to student acid tests, this is a valuable > feedback and I wanted to share that with you. > > Stef >
