Love Talk

[richmond62]

All this "problem" re what is and what isn't 'turn off' stuff is all very fine, and I am sorry I seem to
have been the "rat in the haystack". BUT, the POINT is, surely, to try to get somewhere where we no longer
feel overshadowed by the commercial company from which this Open Source Project is being derived.

My article in "Hello World" was written, in consultation with Hello World's editor who is an extremely competent
person who knows what she is doing, why she is doing it, and her target readership, and I have nothing but respect for her.
The fact that she saw fit to commission my article and publish it should say enough in itself: and I hope that she and I will
start work on a series of "gentle" introductions to programming with "this language" (to avoid using any particular name at the moment)
and its current IDE. I am not going to sit around while people squabble about names and interfaces when what I DO very much
want to do is get as many people as possible in education realise what an incerdibly powerful teaching tool they are missing
and how they might leverage it to make learning how to program computers a lot easier in the 9 to 17 age range.

The fact that that article might not have "fitted" round these parts should be neither here nor there; so when I was asked
why I had written bits of that article in the way I had "I shot from the hip."

This reminds me of a gynaeocologist who told me he knew how to teach English as a Foreign Language because he
had studied the language at High school and had a lower-intermediate grasp of the language. He got offended when
I suggested we swap jobs for a week as I had helped deliver 20-odd breach births on a farm! My level of helping cows
with difficult births (with no formal qualifications whatsoever) was on a par with his understanding of EFL.

Now my pedagogical training as well as my experience both with and with teaching computer programming are extensive
and quite sufficient to write the right sort of article for "Hello World": a magazine largely aimed NOT at computer programmers
as such at all, but retrained British Primary school teachers who, as far as I am concerned are slightly over-enamoured of
the Scratch+fun+dumb-down school of 'programming' which may actually serve to set up hurdles in adoption of other types
of programming subsequently.

LiveCode / OpenXTalk / What-the-sausages, or whatever the name settled on for the Open Source continuer of what is
currently LiveCode Open Source (like it or not) needs to continue to supply what HyperCard and MetaCard once did, and
LiveCode did until 2 signal things happened:

1. The Support for the Open Source version was suddenly dropped.

[The fact that the Open Source versions are readily available online without support should only frighten
timid types: I'm just carry on using them.]

2. LiveCode lost track of that initial HC/MC vision and started going hell-for-leather for fancy bells-and-whistles
leaving an awful lot of ancient bugs unfixed and so on.

CERTAINLY, you are entirely welcome to feel offended by my strong opinions; after all that is one of the things about an open
society and an open series of dialogues. WHAT you should NOT be allowed to do is attempt to silence my opinions because that
is the start of a very dangerous slippery slope.

HOWEVER, my strong opinions have been formed in the fire of attempting to teach both children and other would-be-educators,
rather than by sitting around theorising.