Learning Lounge

[Marc Santoro]

I agree with you a great deal; the first 5-6 topics you described in
detail included, essentially, the reasons I would choose to teach CL and
Squeak.  I think that many of those subtopics would be good
learning projects/topics involving a course on learning a language.

I also do not want to "remove" the fundamental topics -- but I would like
to see the definition of fundamental topics change to include (and perhaps
be centered around) topics that must be understood before the more
advanced topics can be learned.

The pattern I envisioned is based on the topics and skills I would like a
person to have, placed into a development-oriented framework. I want
people writing code! I want people sharing.

I think also that you are starting too quickly; I would like to introduce
a single language (Squeak), which would allow for the development of
understanding of many important core concepts. Once these concepts are
understood, the process of learning different languages should be
expedited greatly. While Squeak is not the best platform (nor is CL) for
each of Tunes' core concepts, I think that a solidly grounded
understanding of one or two languages is much more important at the
beginning than a weak grasp of many languages (in the first topic you
mention 12.9 -- do you really expect a newbie to be able to tackle that? I
would not dare to give more than 1, unless they are already
well-experienced with stuff that is non-traditional or
non-systems-programming) -- particularly when the only concepts in a
language the student is forced to learn are the concepts specifically
related to Tunes.

Thanks,
Marc.