Child's Play
20 Aug 2026 - 20 Aug 2026
- A position paper for a 1996 workshop on programming environments for children.
- This I think holds up. I was ahead of my time (and my problem is, not sure what to do now that time is here).
- It's very academic. None of these things took off mostly because I wasn't actually interested in that. (This sounds like bragging but just trying to be honest).
- Does give a good precis of all my work up to that point. And current diversion into narrative. I think this was actually too much for some people, eg Alan Kay whose interest was in promoting more scientific and technical forms of thought. Narrative is just one of those human habits that interfere with clear thinking (sorry not to put words in ACK mouth, see if I can see something he actually said publically on this)
I will advance the position here that "liveness" or reactivity is an important design principle for programming environments for novices. Programming environments, even for end users, should be powerful enough to support the modeling of living systems. The computer should be seen, not as a tool to compute, but an environment in which things can move, grow, and live.
- Did I actually participate in this? Shamefully I can't remember and there's not enough info online. Probably?