Guido van Rossum wrote: > On 7/12/06, Andreas Raab <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Guido van Rossum wrote: >>> I have no argument with the rest of your message but I want to stop >>> the rhetoric claiming that the WWW is somehow bad for us. >> Heck, no. I didn't mean to say that the web is "bad" for you (as in "TV >> is bad for you"). Limited, yes, and that is the point. Even on my very >> first home computer in the early 80s (Comodore C16) I had a drawing >> program. > > There we go again. You are surrounded by geeks so obviously you don't > realize this any more, but do you have *any* idea how privileged you > were to have a computer in the early 80s?
In what way is this relevant for our discussion? Unless you want me to pretend that prior art doesn't exist, I don't see much relevance in that observation ;-) [But just to answer your question: Yes I have a pretty good idea about it, simply because at the time and place it was pointed out to me over and over and over again] >> On the "web-platform" it effectively took ten years and two >> dozen standards until we've been able to recreate something as >> dog-simple as that. > > You're comparing apples and oranges. People can still do whatever you > did on that C16 if they have a PC at home, no WWW needed. And there > are a lot more PCs and they are a lot cheaper. The WWW is just icing > on the cake. I am not comparing apples and oranges, I am comparing platforms. And that last statement shows precisely where we differ. I don't look at the web as just icing on the cake, to me it's not a supplementary medium. To me it's the whole deal, a platform in and of its own. And when you compare the platforms, the web (maybe with a PC terminal for access) and my C16 you'll find pretty quickly there are lots of things that you can't do on the web. Just go into one of them Internet-Cafes and try installing some software of your own choosing. Or, even worse, try this in a corporate or school setting. You'll notice quickly that you don't have a platform - you have a terminal and the web is the platform. >> And the nature of the discourse simply changes >> dramatically when you have capable authoring tools at your hand to >> express your thoughts - one of the best examples being the Blogosphere >> which has managed to utilize the current limited authoring abilities in >> an amazing way. > > Why do you keep referring to blogs as limited? They are a 1000x more > versatile and accessible than the word processors of the 80s and 90s. > You seem to be forgetting that. Peace. I said "limited authoring capabilities" and given that even today most blog hosting services offer little more than an input field for writing HTML code I think I can defend that position ;-) >> Anyway. I think this discussion is somewhat of a red herring so let's >> not get all locked up about whether the web's good or bad or whether it >> is too limited or "just right". > > I'm all for wanting to improve the web. I just don't accept the claim > that it's somehow a regression. That's because you are comparing Apples and Oranges, and I am comparing platforms. > What's a regression is that schools no longer teach programming. That > trend was apparent even before the web; programming classes (only > offered to very few students of course) have been replaced by > atrocities like "using Word" and "using PowerPoint" (offered to many > more students). Part of this may be due to the teachers -- there > simply aren't enough teachers capable of teaching programming the way > Alan Kay or his favorite teachers teach it... Needless to say: I agree. >> To get back to the Logowiki starting point, the main idea of Logowiki is >> to give people an example for what it *could* mean to include this kind >> of dynamic content in browser. The way I understand it, Crunchy Frog >> seems to be aimed very much in the same direction. > > I've had a hard time finding the exact software that was used here. I > found a Squeak installer that was supposed to run in my browser but > didn't install correctly on my PowerBook. Could you publish some > fool-proof URLs for people to experiment with? I'm not sure which "exact software" you are referring to, we've been touching a couple of things in this discussion. For Logowiki, http://logowiki.net is the reference and there is no plugin required. For Squeak itself, there is Squeak.org which does not offer a webbrowser plugin installation. Our educational site, Squeakland.org offers such an install, see http://www.squeakland.org/plugin/download.html which is a custom Squeak version intended for use with eToys. Cheers, - Andreas _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
