[IAEP] [Fwd: 0.84 goals]

[Albert Cahalan]

victor rajewski writes:
> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com>
> wrote:

>> You're using it exclusively, right...? (no bash, no MacOS, etc.)
>>
>> If it's not good enough for you, then it's definitely not good
>> enough to be forced on other people.
>
> That would be like expecting gnome/OSX/windows developers to use
> the GUI exclusively without using the command line. The GUI is for
> a particular set of users, power users and developers might need
> something else. A 10 year old student and a tertiary educated software
> developer will have different needs from a file system.

I don't know about gnome developers, but as for OSX and windows,
yes they definitely do work exclusively in the GUI. I've seen it
with my own eyes for Windows. (creepy!) I have to assume that
pre-OSX developers didn't use a command line, because there
wasn't any command line at all.

Windows developers don't even type filenames into a Makefile.
They just use the GUI.

> Gmail and delicious (and no doubt others) use a tag-and-search system;
> they both work great for me, and if a similar functionality existed
> for my regular filesystem, I'd use it in a second.

Gmail is tolerable (barely) because email is mostly searchable text
and because Google throws a massive compute farm at the problem.
On the XO, we have mostly non-text and no compute power to spare.

>> Here is an example: pretend you are a kid who wants to learn about
>> his computer by exploring the filesystem. You want to look in /dev,
>> look in /etc, and so on. Using only Sugar, can you do it?
>
> No, just like you can't do this in OSX using just the GUI. That's what
> the terminal is there for.

I can do that with GNOME, KDE, and Windows. While I think bash is
wonderful, forcing people into it just to view files is no good.

>> Clearly you are not a Journal user. You may have played with it,
>> and you may have even written some code for it... but clearly you
>> do not really use it.
>
> This is the tricky part - we are not the intended audience of the
> journal/sugar. The intended audience is school kids. We need to be
> looking at how they use it and if it suits them, not if it suits us.

This bothers me greatly. I'll do my best to explain, but it isn't
all that easy.

Perhaps you've heard of "the soft bigotry of low expectations".
You're... looking down on the kids when you decide that they can't
use the same thing as yourself. They get toys, not tools.

I can agree that some of the more complex stuff should be out of
the way by default. The journal is more than that though; it makes
the more complex stuff simply unavailable. It also encourages a
mental model that is not in line with reality. The result is a
limit to how far a kid can advance.