[IAEP] [SLOBS] Sugar Labs 2010 Goals Review

[Tim McNamara]

On 15 July 2010 07:04, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:

> >> Are developers using Sugar as their day-to-day development
> >> environment yet?
> >
> > Certainly not me... I'm not even sure it will ever happen. Even
> [...]
> > However, I've seen many teachers using Sugar. Not just Browse. They also
> > use Write and Record.
> [...]
> > Given a choice, many teachers started using Gnome. Some of them messed
> > up their systems, just like children.
>
> So consider this a mild suggestion that the "dogfooding" goal has some
> way yet to go.  Major developers can't use Sugar for day-to-day work,
> and even teachers who try this have difficulty.  Since Gnome is (in
> your admission) not a good alternative either, it seems like there's
> something left to be done here, if only for the teachers' use case.
> (Perhaps the task is just to refine the Gnome image distributed with
> Sugar to be more appropriate for naive users.)
>
>
I think it's highly inappropriate to say that eating your own dogfood means
that software developers, or even teachers, should use Sugar. Sugar is an
environment that is used by teachers to create learning environments for
children. Therefore, it's impossible that we as adults will ever be able to
do experience the software as it was intended. We shouldn't set ourselves
impossible goals.

Sugar is not a general computing environment. Sugar is for learners. It's a
highly structured place where details like filesystems & even files
themselves are hidden. Software devs care about files. Teachers care about
applications that are for school administration. Software developers go to
extensive lengths to customise their development environment. People are
highly specific about what maximises their own productivity.

Looking at Bernie's original list, it seems that Sugar Labs has done
exceptionally well with its available resources.

Tim
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