Posted in Art, Education, Programming, tagged air guitar, Education, guitar hero, Programming, south park on June 10, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Since I started listening to Alan Kay’s ideas I’ve kept hearing him use the phrase “air guitar” to describe what he sees as shallow ideas, both in terms of educational and industry practice, which are promoted by a pop culture. Kay is a musician, among other things, so I can see where he’d come up [...]
Posted in Analysis, Programming, Squeak, Technology and Software, tagged .Net, C++, History, Java, OOP, Smalltalk on June 2, 2008 | No Comments »
Paul Murphy saw fit to give me another guest spot on his blog, called “The tattered history of OOP”, talking about the history of OOP practice, where the idea came from, and how industry has implemented it. If you’ve been reading my blog this will probably be review. I’m just spreading the message a little [...]
Posted in Education, Programming, Squeak on March 17, 2008 | 3 Comments »
I found this through The Weekly Squeak. Randal Schwartz demo’d the current Squeakland version of Squeak/EToys on Leo Laporte’s show, “The Lab” (video link). I just think it’s neat it’s getting some mainstream recognition.
Schwartz and Laporte gave a quick history of Smalltalk at the start, and they told it pretty accurately. For the uninitiated it may go by too [...]
Posted in Programming, Squeak on March 16, 2008 | No Comments »
The 2nd edition of Squeak by Example is out now (h/t to The Weekly Squeak for this). Like the first edition, it’s a book released as a PDF under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license. You can also get a hardcopy edition of it for $20.10 USD. They also welcome donations. Another tidbit of news is that the [...]
Posted in Analysis, Programming, Technology and Software on March 6, 2008 | 30 Comments »
Joshua Bloch, Chief Java Architect at Google, gave a talk entitled “The Closures Controversy” at Javapolis in December 2007. I found it online through reddit, and it intrigued me, because I think it illustrates a disconnect between what we as an industry are doing and the goals we have. Bloch also makes what I think [...]
Posted in Programming, Squeak, Technology and Software on February 26, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I found this item on reddit. An entry in the GNU Smalltalk FAQ, under the heading “Does GNU Smalltalk run Seaside?” says that it will support Seaside in a release scheduled for March 8th. Now, the FAQ posting that says this is dated June 20, 2007. I’ve asked about this on reddit. Has the release date slipped any [...]
Posted in Education, Programming, Technology and Software on February 21, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The XO went into production late last year, and I’ve been looking for interesting material on it to talk about here. David Pogue of the New York Times did a review of the XO last year, but I just found the video for it.
I think he does a really good job of presenting it in [...]
Posted in Analysis, Education, Programming on November 16, 2007 | No Comments »
…playing off the name of an old Bangles tune…
I ran across a case in point for this, thanks to James Robertson’s blog. Steve Jones is talking about the current state of the art in the organization of IT software development:
So why do I choose to have strict contracts, static languages, early validation of everything and [...]
Posted in History, Just For Fun, Programming on October 31, 2007 | 12 Comments »
Compute! Magazine
Back to reminiscing! I’m dedicating this part in the series to this magazine, because I think it was that good. Compute! was published from 1979 to 1994. Though it started out focusing exclusively on computers that used the MOS 6502 CPU, or some variant, like the Apple II, Atari 8-bits (400, 800, XL and [...]
Posted in Education, History, Programming, Technology and Software on October 19, 2007 | 8 Comments »
I saw that lispy wrote about this. I happened to spot the original speech by Richard Stallman on reddit. The title intrigued me: “My Lisp Experiences and the Development of Emacs”. I’ll go through some pieces of it, because there are some interesting stories in here.
My first experience with Lisp was when I read the Lisp [...]
