[IAEP] [SLOBS] Sugar Labs 2010 Goals Review

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from Tim McNamara's message of Wed Jul 14 19:54:40 +0000 2010:

> 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.

Sorry to quote you fully instead of summarising, but I want to make sure
to highlight I totally disagree with _all_ of this.

I am aware Sugar Labs currently advertises Sugar as being specially suited
for school children. But that doesn't imply the opposite is true, i.e.
that it is unsuited for other people - on the contrary, I believe Sugar
to be an equally good fit for most non-expert users (and even some of
the experts).
Don't let the fact that Sugar is still immature (despite being shipped to
a huge user base) mislead you into thinking that the current restrictions
are a design goal when in fact they are not ("low floor *and* _no_ 
_ceiling_").

I firmly believe that eating our own dog food is a _necessary_ step for
Sugar to mature and grow.

I could reply to each of your points individually to show exactly why I
think they are all out of line with the stated principles [1,2] of Sugar,
but that would be distracting from the real issue: How Sugar is perceived,
both by current users (esp. teachers) and even quite a few Sugar Labs
members.

Sascha

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs#Mission
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines/Design_Fundamentals/Key_Design_Principles
--
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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