Re: LFM + LFSP = LFE?

["Neil W. Van Dyke" <address@hidden>]

Avi Bryant <avi@beta4.com> writes at 19:38 11-Jun-2003 -0700:
> The thing is that I wouldn't consider Smalltalk a Language for the Masses
> - although it's great for children and others with uncorrupted minds, it's
> a struggle to break hardened developers free of their addictions to emacs
> and edit/compile/run cycles, and get them comfortable with a real object
> environment.

I imagine the various morphs worlds that have been layered atop
Smalltalk (and Self) probably seem foreign to most adult programmers.

But, now that OOP is thoroughly mainstream, does anyone have anecdotal
experience with, say, Java programmers being exposed to the Smalltalk-80
language and browser-based environment?

> If the Masses that mattered were motivated children rather than
> close-minded adults, we'd be a lot better off in lots of ways...

Who's to say kids are not the most important. :) Longer time horizon,
but bigger potential payoff.  And with kids, language/tool designers
have more opportunities to ask, "What if people were able to add *this*
way of thinking to their cognitive repetoire?" rather than "How do we
make this language/tool accessible to the largest number of people who
are relatively set in their ways?"

-- 
                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/