Smalltalk

Guzdial, M.

Programming environments for novices. Computer science education research. 127–154 (2004).

Smalltalk-72, by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, and other members of the Xerox PARC Learning Research Group, extended the model of Logo in several different ways. Smalltalk was developed along the path to creating the Dynabook, a computer whose purpose is to support learning through creation and exploration of the rich range of media that a computer enables [17].

Kay agreed with Papert that computers should be used by students for knowledge expression and learning through debugging of those expressions. However, he felt that the computational power provided by Logo was too weak, so he invented object-oriented programming as a way of enabling much more complex artifacts to be created in exploration of more complex domains. The command-line metaphors of Logo were too weak for the drawing, painting, and typeset-quality text that Kay felt was critical in order to enable rich media creation, so he and his group literally invented the desktop user interface as we know it today (Figure 3). Within this metaphor, Smalltalk provided a wide variety of programmer tools within the environment, including code browsers, object inspectors, and powerful debugging tools.

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