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Fwd: Seymour Papert Gravely Injured in Motorbike Accident

Giles Bowkett

12/8/2006 2:54:00 PM

I know it's off-topic, but this guy is awesome, and this news is terrible.

Pray for him, send him good vibes, whatever your belief system
accomodates. A great innovator, we want him to pull through.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

>From Andy Carvin:

Hi everyone,

I've just received the terrible news that education
technology pioneer Seymour Papert has been gravely
injured in an accident in Hanoi. He was attending a
conference there and was hit by a motorbike,
sustaining significant head trauma.

The boston globe has a story here:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/12/07/mit_figure_struck_injured...

and I've blogged about it here:

http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2006/12/prayers_for_seymour_p...

Seymour is one of the developers of constructionist
learning theory. He helped found MIT's artificial
intelligence lab, developed the LOGO programming
language and inspired both the Maine laptop initiative
and the $100 laptop.

Hopefully he will pull through, but he will need all
the thoughts and prayers we can muster.

andy



--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesg...
http://gilesbowkett.bl...
http://gilesgoatboy.bl...
15 Answers

Trans

12/8/2006 4:26:00 PM

0


Giles Bowkett wrote:
> I know it's off-topic, but this guy is awesome, and this news is terrible.
>
> Pray for him, send him good vibes, whatever your belief system
> accomodates. A great innovator, we want him to pull through.

:-(

Logo should have become the Basic of today.

Heart goes out...
T.

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

12/8/2006 4:52:00 PM

0

Trans wrote:
> Logo should have become the Basic of today.
>
It wasn't for lack of trying that it didn't, actually. The original "target market" for Logo was elementary school children, and the target market for BASIC was undergraduates. It simply takes longer for an elementary school child to become a decision maker than it does for an undergraduate. :)

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blo...

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

12/8/2006 4:55:00 PM

0

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Trans wrote:
>> Logo should have become the Basic of today.
>>
> It wasn't for lack of trying that it didn't, actually. The original
> "target market" for Logo was elementary school children, and the
> target market for BASIC was undergraduates. It simply takes longer for
> an elementary school child to become a decision maker than it does for
> an undergraduate. :)
>
Along those lines, what do they teach undergraduates today? Mostly
Scheme and Java, I think.

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blo...

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.

greg.kujawa

12/8/2006 5:50:00 PM

0

True. I recall moving the turtle back in the day. That must have been
7th grade or so.

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Trans wrote:
> > Logo should have become the Basic of today.
> >
> It wasn't for lack of trying that it didn't, actually. The original "target market" for Logo was elementary school children, and the target market for BASIC was undergraduates. It simply takes longer for an elementary school child to become a decision maker than it does for an undergraduate. :)
>
> --
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
> http://borasky-research.blo...
>
> If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.

Jeremy McAnally

12/8/2006 9:50:00 PM

0

Progression in the department I used to work in:
VisualBasic (101) -> C (102) -> Java (optional course) (103) -> C++
(121 and 221) -> Graduate.

Other courses were things like circuits and logic, operating systems,
compiler design, and so on. No Scheme, LISP, Ruby, or other solid
functional and/or dynamic languages.

It was a great engineering school, but had a really weak CS program...

--Jeremy

On 12/8/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> > Trans wrote:
> >> Logo should have become the Basic of today.
> >>
> > It wasn't for lack of trying that it didn't, actually. The original
> > "target market" for Logo was elementary school children, and the
> > target market for BASIC was undergraduates. It simply takes longer for
> > an elementary school child to become a decision maker than it does for
> > an undergraduate. :)
> >
> Along those lines, what do they teach undergraduates today? Mostly
> Scheme and Java, I think.
>
> --
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
> http://borasky-research.blo...
>
> If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.
>
>
>

jameshcunningham@gmail.com

12/9/2006 12:20:00 AM

0

On 2006-12-08 11:55:02 -0500, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky"
<znmeb@cesmail.net> said:

> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>> Trans wrote:
>>> Logo should have become the Basic of today.
>>>
>> It wasn't for lack of trying that it didn't, actually. The original
>> "target market" for Logo was elementary school children, and the target
>> market for BASIC was undergraduates. It simply takes longer for an
>> elementary school child to become a decision maker than it does for an
>> undergraduate. :)
>>
> Along those lines, what do they teach undergraduates today? Mostly
> Scheme and Java, I think.

Primarily Java and C++. I think Scheme is a quirk of some of the
tougher schools.

At my school - the University of Kentucky - C++ is taught from the
beginning and used in almost every undergraduate programming course
thereafter, with the occasional domain-specific exception. I think this
is a mistake, but nobody asked me.

Best,
James

David Vallner

12/9/2006 4:29:00 PM

0

gregarican wrote:
> True. I recall moving the turtle back in the day. That must have been
> 7th grade or so.
>

Hrm, early high school for me, which wasn't THAT long ago (although I
was exposed to Speccy logo when I was about seven). It Still Lives On.
(Probably owed to a rather popular nationalised port the local
university made. Which seems to have become Imagine Logo nowadays. With
a web browser plugin. Oh dear ;P)

Followed by a Pascal course I couldn't attend half of the lessons, the
teacher half of the others, making it a spectacular flop. And then a PHP
one, which made me responsible for horrors unseen ;P And then a notably
more successful Pascal one, with a rather gruesome
lots-of-procedures-and-global-variables style. (But still probably more
readable than that of the rest of the class, which involved doing
everything inline.)

David Vallner

David Vallner

12/9/2006 4:48:00 PM

0

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Along those lines, what do they teach undergraduates today? Mostly
> Scheme and Java, I think.
>

C in the freshman year. If I hadn't had some PHP and Pascal before (i.e.
hadn't mostly known the syntax and how to wrestle pointers), I'd prolly
have ran away screaming and was well on my way into middle management by
now.

It was a bad choice for a freshman language, with badly led courses -
the instructor was hopping rather erratically between stressing how the
point is to be able to develop the algorithms (which is a problem class
I don't like solving as opposed to design and data modelling), and on
the other hand abusing pointer arithmethics with reckless abandon in
example code. Oh, and fighting with me over C syntax until I started
bringing my copy of K&R - which I had by then memorised - to class.
(Humiliating college instructors is so rewarding in a very wrong way.)

After that an optional Java course, and then the classes shifted into
hardware more, when I only had classmates to troll with Ruby.

The software specialisation had the usual Logical and Functional
Programming, led mostly in a homebrewn Lisp 1.5, which -coincidentally-
a high-up professor had written a textbook on fifteen years or so ago.
(Huh? What is this "move on" you speak of?). I find it highly amusing I
can work out Prolog homework for people taking that introductory course
worldwide despite never having passed it. (In horribly procedural
Prolog, but hey.)

Scheme I didn't see any at all. If the Scheme courses are all similar in
structure to the SICP I know from the lecture videos, it seems more like
a course to teach how programs / programming languages work, than how to
program. Then again, it's hard to say where one ends and the other
begins. (And I suspect they actually overlap or one is a subset of the
other ;P)

And a graceless flunk soon afterwards. Ah well.

David Vallner
Hypergraphic

Giles Bowkett

12/9/2006 7:04:00 PM

0

I only took one programming class in my life. I was 11. It was BASIC
on a TRS-80.

So, take it with a grain of salt, but I think programming classes
should start with something easy to read (like Ruby) and progress to
more complicated stuff like Java or C or whatever after students are
used to the basic task of programming. I mean it's a way of thinking,
you start music students on recorders and xylophones. Ruby is of
course powerful but it's still great for beginners because you want
beginners on something readable. I did some tutoring for a local
college, their CS students couldn't handle System.out.println() yet
and they were asking me things like "what the hell is variable
type-casting?" That's like teaching complex numbers before you teach
addition. Introductory courses shouldn't be weighed down with arcane
complexities.

The other thing is, I had an interview once with this startup. They
had a really young guy as their main tech guy. Fresh out of school, no
work experience. Very smart guy, but I don't think he had ever read
"Design Patterns" or "Refactoring", and he wanted to know how I would
implement a tree sort.

I definitely think CS courses should be teaching Fowler before Knuth.
The number of times you'll need to make good OOP design decisions is
probably going to many, many more than the number of times you'll need
to cook up an efficient low-level tree-sort implementation. It almost
seems like, being self-taught, I might be better off.


On 12/9/06, David Vallner <david@vallner.net> wrote:
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> > Along those lines, what do they teach undergraduates today? Mostly
> > Scheme and Java, I think.
> >
>
> C in the freshman year. If I hadn't had some PHP and Pascal before (i.e.
> hadn't mostly known the syntax and how to wrestle pointers), I'd prolly
> have ran away screaming and was well on my way into middle management by
> now.
>
> It was a bad choice for a freshman language, with badly led courses -
> the instructor was hopping rather erratically between stressing how the
> point is to be able to develop the algorithms (which is a problem class
> I don't like solving as opposed to design and data modelling), and on
> the other hand abusing pointer arithmethics with reckless abandon in
> example code. Oh, and fighting with me over C syntax until I started
> bringing my copy of K&R - which I had by then memorised - to class.
> (Humiliating college instructors is so rewarding in a very wrong way.)
>
> After that an optional Java course, and then the classes shifted into
> hardware more, when I only had classmates to troll with Ruby.
>
> The software specialisation had the usual Logical and Functional
> Programming, led mostly in a homebrewn Lisp 1.5, which -coincidentally-
> a high-up professor had written a textbook on fifteen years or so ago.
> (Huh? What is this "move on" you speak of?). I find it highly amusing I
> can work out Prolog homework for people taking that introductory course
> worldwide despite never having passed it. (In horribly procedural
> Prolog, but hey.)
>
> Scheme I didn't see any at all. If the Scheme courses are all similar in
> structure to the SICP I know from the lecture videos, it seems more like
> a course to teach how programs / programming languages work, than how to
> program. Then again, it's hard to say where one ends and the other
> begins. (And I suspect they actually overlap or one is a subset of the
> other ;P)
>
> And a graceless flunk soon afterwards. Ah well.
>
> David Vallner
> Hypergraphic
>
>
>


--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesg...
http://gilesbowkett.bl...
http://gilesgoatboy.bl...

Devin Mullins

12/9/2006 8:15:00 PM

0

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Along those lines, what do they teach undergraduates today? Mostly
> Scheme and Java, I think.
<life-story>
At age 8, I started with BASIC (gwbasic, qbasic, etc.). I'm not sure who
recommended that language -- it might've been an undergrad that my mom
hired to "tutor" me. At around 4th grade, I got private teaching from a
high school CS teacher, in Pascal (and a brief stint in Karel). 7th &
8th I took C/C++ in a high school CS course, an AP CS course, and a
community college course. In 12th grade, some teachers tried to get us
hooked on CLisp and Python, but it didn't stick.

*In* college, we programmed in C++, with the exception of a Compilers
and Languages course, which had us writing parsers & interpreters in
OCaml (though, granted, with little O), with a little stint in Prolog,
just to show us what else is out there.

Finally, nowadays, I'm told that my alma mater is teaching in Java.
(Boo.) I imagine the same exception applies for the Compilers, course,
though.
</life-story>

And my opinion, FWIW: A combination of a language that maps closely to
how we think (say, Ruby), with a language that maps closely to how the
computer thinks (say, C, or even some assembly language).

Devin

PS--I saw LOGO, briefly, in some computer camp. Stayed away from it.