Editor's Daily Blog

OOPSLA Educator's Symposium

Alan Kay keynotes

At yesterday's OOPSLA Educator's Symposium, Eugene Wallingford introduced Alan Kay with Kay's famous quote, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Kay's talk was a combination of some of his traditional themes with his thoughts on what should be included in a first course in computing taught in high school or college. If we accept that the computer revolution hasn't happened yet then we need to consider how this might change the content of an intro course and the point of view from which we teach it.

Kay said that the corresponding first course in English doesn't lead someone to becoming a professional reader or writer. Instead it is a course in ideas. Contrast this with what we do in an introductory Computer Science course. Kay argued that we teach CS too much like driver's education or as part of a four year undergraduate vocational program. He noted that one advantage that an English class has is that students have learned to read and write from an early age. The college professor can assume a certain amount of literacy. The best way to teach a first course in college is to urge a real computer literacy in the early grades. That requires an environment where the kids can program from scratch. Even in first year college courses you have to have an environment for beginners that contains no gratuitous difficulties.

Looking to reading again for ideas, Kay said that "if you don't read for fun yyou won't read for purpose." Similarly, he added, "of you don't compute for fun you won't be fluent enough to compute for purpose." The challenge is how to get kids and adults to compute for fun. The Squeak and Croquet environments that he demo'd are his team's attempt to provide a place where people can compute for fun.

In today's Weblogs, Joshua Marinacci writes a Webstart Rant. He asks "what you'd like to see out of webstart. What are the missing features. What are the most important bugs? I want to figure out what we can do through addons and what requires changes from Sun." As always, his posts get a lot of feedback - add yours.

In Also in Java Today , we ask: have you used printf yet? The Core Java Tech Tip Formatting output with the new formatter provides examples of using formatted text with System.out.format(), System.out.printf(), and related APIs. The new feature takes advantage of the addition of varargs in Tiger and should feel familiar (but not identical) to C programmers.Have you used printf yet? The Core Java Tech Tip Formatting output with the new formatter provides examples of using formatted text with System.out.format(), System.out.printf(), and related APIs. The new feature takes advantage of the addition of varargs in Tiger and should feel familiar (but not identical) to C programmers.

One advantage of annotations over XML metadata, according to Mike Keith in To Annotate or Not? is that annotations "are attached to the program artifacts they describe. This both gives relevance to the metadata when viewed and provides the multiple layers of context that must be explicitly conveyed in XML." On the other hand, " Annotations may only be read at runtime, not added. Annotating the classes is not an option, and the tool is forced to use XML or some other mechanism external to the class."

In Projects and Communities , the Java Desktop community highlights Configure J, "a Swing-compatible library for creating user-configurable menus, tool bars, and pop ups."

The Patterns community links to this Catalog of Non-Software Examples of Design Patterns "such as the manufacturing of cars or the way a fast food restaurant prepares food."

In today's Forums, dgriffit continues the discussion of Make class keyword work the same as this. "Classes can be defined inside code blocks, it's just that nobody does so. It's a valid part of the inner class specification. Google for "limited-scope inner class". I've never seen one outside of some very complete tutorials, though." He also writes the entry "Monitors as part of every object, rather than separate Lock objects. Keep the synchronized statement, but require that it take Lock objects as arguments. Lose the synchronized method flag. Much more clarity, much better control, and 4 bytes less per object. Sadly, it's way too late to make this change."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• NetBeans 4.1 Early Access Release
• Apache Forrest 0.6
• Java Vuln. for Nokia 6410i Found and Patched
• JavaMail API 1.3.2
• PMD 2.0
• IBM Joins Liberty Alliance

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• October 24-28, 2004 OOPSLA 2004
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