New Website!

We have a new website and a new logo for our community. Go Smalltalk!

Smalltalk was designed for Kids!

Yes! Alan Kay was trying to develop an environment to be used in the education of our kids.

Did you Know that Smalltalk was created in 70's at Xerox?

The use of the mouse, the "copy and paste", the bitblt and others technologies was firstly created in Smalltalk. Steve Jobs saw those ideas at Xerox and he developed a new language, Objective-C.

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February 5, 2009

Bertrand Meyer in Argentine

Bertrand Meyer is giving a conference the next February 11th, 2009 at the Universidad Tecnologica Nacional (National Technological University) called "Touch of Class: How we teach introductory programming".
This is the abstract of the conference: "Teaching programming faces a host of challenges, due in particular to he unprecedented variety of student backgrounds and to the demands of the IT industry. Techniques that worked well in the seventies do not scale up to today's context. The "concepts or skills?" debate is more relevant than ever, especially in the ever more globalized world of software development.
For the past 6 years, we have taught introductory programming at ETH, based on an "outside-in" approach that makes it possible to introduce the reality of large software while emphasizing the principles of sound software development. This approach has resulted in a forthcoming textbook ("Touch of Class: An Introduction to Programming well with Objects and Contracts", Springer-Verlag, May 2009). I will present the result of our experience, including metrics that we have systematically collected along the way, and draw conclusions regarding how to teach programming today. I will argue the task consists of teaching twenty-six seminal concepts, and will explore one of them in depth."

For more information, please refer to: http://www.seminariosathena.com.ar/