On 1/28/07, Julian T. [email protected] wrote:
letting them draw things.
Which, by occasion, is going to be called Squeak (and will run
without Ruby in the first place)
Not if you are me.
Etoys gives bad ahbits and I haven’t managed to do graphics in
Smalltalk/Squeak to this day.
After reading about ST, playing with Squeak, marvelling at the
browseability
of it all and the elegant simple language I’ve decided to learn how to
use
it. “Finally, a language well-suited for GUI and graphics programming”,
I
thought to myself.
At the time I promised the manager of a kindergarten for underdeveloped
children that I’ll code software to replace the horrible software they
used
to teach the children about action-reaction (that if they do something
it
affects the world around them) that actually worked against it’s cause.
The program was supposed to be very simple: A full screen display of a
white
canvas that can be painted on with a “mouse” (they had touch screens)
and
/when/ painted on, cycles colors of a circle around the mouse position
(combination of very simple screensaver-like graphics tricks with mouse
input. Piece of cake, even in C which is very ill-suited for GUI
programming).
I chose Squeak for three reasons:
- Deploying couldn’t be easier
- Smalltalk is supposed to be fitted perfectly to this kind of problem
- I wanted to learn Smalltalk
After a week of trying to learn from the library, trying to learn from
the
Squeak Paint program, trying to find good online tutorials, trying to do
it
with MVC and Morphic - well, I gave up without having even a canvas I
can
paint on with a photoshop-pencil-like tool.
So it’s not something I’d teach 16 year olds.
I’d rather teach things that if I were them, I’d be able to figure out
myself and not need the teacher for.
I figured out how to use Ruby/SDL, when I needed it, in less than half
an
hour.
I figured out how to use Ruby, when I decided to, the moment I tried
(no,
seriously!).
That says good things about Ruby as a programming language to teach 16
year
old-s.
Currently I’m waiting for the contact details of that kindergarten to
reach
me (someone is supposed to give them to me but she insists on waiting
for a
certain event before she passes that email on, having to do with the
rest of
the group which I visited the place as part of). The moment I will, I’ll
talk details with them and guess I could deliver a Ruby/SDL
implementation
within a day.
Aur S.
BTW I went through writing all this just because I hoped it’d get
someone to
shout “idiot! Why didn’t you do or use learning
resource?!” at
me, so if you know what this and that are, please drop a line.
