| Abstract: |
"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have
C++ in mind." - Alan Kay
Prof. Aaron Lanterman invites you to a showing of the "Squeakers"
documentary, a winner of four Emmy awards. Squeak is a dialect of the
Smalltalk programming language and environment with extensive multimedia
support. To ease porting to different platforms, Squeak's virtual
machine
is written in a subset of Squeak called Slang that can be debugged in
the
Squeak environment and then compiled into C for rapid execution. Squeak
is
one of the latest inventions by Alan Kay, the legendary computer
scientist
whose research group at Xerox PARC developed desktop publishing,
ethernet,
object-oriented programming, integrated development environments, and
the
GUI interface as we know it today, with its mice, menus, icons, windows,
and bitmapped displays. The Squeak project has followed Alan Kay from
Apple Computer to Disney, and is now centered at Hewlett-Packard. The
Squeakers DVD focuses on the SqueakToys interface, which allows children
to develop complex simulations of real-world systems to aid in learning
math and science. This inspiring video features interviews with Alan Kay
(offering a particularly fascinating glimpse into Xerox Parc in the
1970s)
and Seymour Papert, who developed the Logo language at M.I.T. The
College
of Computing uses Squeak in "CS2340: Objects and Design." Squeak is
available for free download from www.squeak.org.
For more information
about its educational potential, see www.squeakland.org, particularly
Alan
Kay's essays at:
http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essays.html
The video's running time is around 43 minutes. At the end, Aaron will
briefly demonstrate some of Squeak's features live.
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