I don't think anyone would argue that we need better tools for software development on the XO. There has been a latent Develop activity in the works that occasionally gets a boost from the community (want to jump in?). I would argue that a bigger stumbling block than problems with Sugar and "interpreted languages" is a lack of good affordances. In particular, the screen is small, so you have to keep a lot around in your head. (As Alan pointed out in a recent post, this may not be as great a liability as I believe--Knuth's "desk checking" didn't hold him back, but he is somewhat special in the world of programming). One idea that has also been kicking around for a while is to take advantage of the fact that most deployments involve multiple laptops, so once could spread the debugging task out across multiple windows on multiple machines. (Perhaps the Sugar collaboration model (and X-Windows) will come to the rescue of the Sugar development problem.)
The good news is that there has been a great deal of innovation with the XOs already. The children at Galadima made their won spelling dictionary for Igbo; the children in Thailand came up with some innovative uses of TamTam for orchestral performances that also incorporate indigenous instruments; there have been many innovative uses of the sharing feature in write to encourage peer editing of documents. None of these innovations involve hacking code -- yet -- but they are all part of a cultural shift in school that is synergistic with the ideals of appropriation of not just software, but of ideas. Not a bad start. -walter _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar