Hi,

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I think it is hard for someone that already internalize the concept of image and self contained environment to understand why this confusion is happening, but when you come to think about it that is not so strange because people are used to files and all those crap static stuff, so it is kind of a huge paradigm shift learning Pharo: it is��confusing for them.��

John W. Maxwell [1]. It was until I read it that I understood I was making the wrong comparisons. I was trying to compare Squeak to other programming languages, but the proper comparison was against Operative Systems and so what was alien and complicated became simple. Smalltalk was this blend of OS + language + IDE + DVCS + App + Docs, without all the complexity of "the everything is a file" mantra of the Unix legacy approach. In fact if you have the previous combination the complexity explodes.

[1] https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0055157

In this alternative curriculum for critical code+data literacy, starting with history instead of (dumb) "hello world"[2] is very appreciated and a different connection point for several disciplines: philosophy, journalism, science, activism and even programming, because once they get the idea that Smalltalk was the thing that would make alto/dynabook computers work (as Unix and its legacy is the thing that makes PC/Macs work) the new paradigm becomes less alien and the start to wonder why we have this single narrative of computing.

[2] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/dumb-hello-world

I think that is important to share this educational questions and perspectives for richer entry points to this community for programmers and non-programmers, so thanks Vitor for sparking this conversation.

Here is a small capture of our mind map used to introduce the curriculum I was talking in this thread, to contrast the two traditions of computing and their mantras, Unix "everything is a file" and Dynabook/Smalltalk "everything is an object"�� (now the challenge is to bridge them):



(The full mind map is at [3] http://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/grafoscopio/doc/tip/Docs/Es/Presentaciones/grafoscopio.pdf )

Cheers,

Offray