undefined | Better HN

0 pointse12e12y ago0 comments

Did you ever do any research/tests/courses with Smalltalk as the first language?

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

skrishnamurthi12y ago· 2 in thread

Nope. Virtually nobody uses Smalltalk as the first language any longer anyway, to the best of my knowledge.

e12eOP12y ago

Well, I'm guessing not that many are using Pyret as a first language (yet) either... (Actually, I think a few people are still using Squeak to teach kids programming, so that's not even true)?

Anyway, I was more curious if you'd done such a study because

a) It's a very concise and consistent syntax, and

b) with all the great work that appears to go into Pharo Smalltalk it would seem to be viable option (again).

And yes, I do mean for computer science (not "just" programming):

http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/blog/petitparser-1 http://www.squeaksource.com/OMeta/

(This in addition to the nice design of Smalltalk-80 - and no, of course it isn't perfect -- is any language)

skrishnamurthi12y ago

Sorry, my point was not to get into a popularity pissing match. I do believe popularity and quality are largely unrelated.

What I meant is, since most people have stopped teaching with Smalltalk, it's really hard to do the kind of research I'm talking about! We had no trouble doing it for Racket because we were able to get lots of data and from it measure for statistical significance.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse