Jecel Assumpcao Jr writes:
On Monday 23 April 2001 17:05, Steve Dekorte wrote:
On Tuesday, April 17, 2001, at 11:33 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
[...] I have found it nearly impossible to change people's minds, to "covert" them...
Right, that's the problem I'm getting at. It seems there's so many great technologies/ideas that sit on the shelf because inventors don't understand marketing. It's been said that in engineering there are no technical problems, only people problems. For those of us that want to see the innovations of Smalltalk and Self in widespread use, our biggest problem isn't technological. It's figuring out how to get people to use new technologies.
Easy: get everyone around them to use them. Most people go with the crowd. Obviously, this leads to a recursive bootstrap problem :-(
This kind of phenomena was studid by philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. They argue that it takes time for innovations to be accepted by the larger community not because the community is filled with morons, but because it is filled with people who are very adept at working in their world-view. To these people, the innovations are not valuable because they have so much invested in the old way of doing things.
For example, though the heliocentric view of planetary motion was a more elegant way to explain the motion of the planets, the geocentric was actually more accurate with respect observations in Galeleo's time. It was able to account for things that could not be explained until Einstein (the precession of Mars or something like that...).
In the most pessimistic, Kuhn observed that many new scientific theories are not adopted by the peers of the creators. It is rather the next generation or people with different backgrounds who bring about the adoption of the new theory. These people never developed a facility with the old way of doing things and are less reluctant to change.
I don't know the histroy of ideas in computer science -- does this accurately describe e.g., the adoption of relational vs. navigational/hierarchical databases.
I'm reminded of Alan Key's barb about Java being dangerous because it makes new ideas look like old ones. Perhaps that's also why Java has been so quickly adopted.
To solve this problem, I am targetting schools which want to look more modern than the others. If all students in a class get a new computer on the same day, then they will be using what everyone around them is using without any of them having to be the "early adopter".
That's a good approach.
My plan is to target people who want and need to use programming as a tool, but who don't know much programming. In particular, I want to go after computer musicians. MAX/MSP is a programming environment that many are familiar with and it has a Self 4-like user-interface. However, many tasks that should be easy are cumbersome in it. SuperCollider, on the other hand is a Smalltalk-like language for making music. It's very powerful, but more difficult for people to get into (partially because it doesn't have things that make Smalltalk so nice -- like debuggers and browsers).
I think an approach that combines the best of these two using Self has a chance to get adopted.
But if it were your goal is to change the world(in your case it isn't),
Actually, it is. In fact, I intend to change it twice in a row just so that nobody can claim I just got lucky.
For me, just the fact that I can run Self and Smalltalk on my Macintosh Powerbook and that we are here discussing them is an outstading success for all these things.
- sekhar
-- C. Ramakrishnan cramakrishnan@acm.org
On Fri, 27 Apr 2001 cramakrishnan@acm.org wrote:
This kind of phenomena was studid by philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.
Kuhn is (more or less) the source of the now-overused phrase "paradigm-shift".
I don't know the histroy of ideas in computer science -- does this accurately describe e.g., the adoption of relational vs. navigational/hierarchical databases.
I wrote a paper about this for one of my Humanities, Science and Technology courses many years ago. Unfortunately, I can only currently lay hands on hardcopy, and even that is buried. Oh, well. It's not like it was a brilliant or particularly informed piece, anyway.
In breif, though, I argued that one could view the evolution from machine code to assembly to C to OOP as a series of Kuhnian paradigms, complete with the existing worldview issues, the "shelving" concept, exemplars, and so forth.
In Kuhn's parlance, when scientists laboring under a worldview encounter phenomena they can't explaining using their existing vocabulary, they "shelve" the problem. As the number of "shelved" problems grows, it triggers a sort of instability in the worldview that causes the rebels to look elsewhere for something that encompasses not just what is already explained, but also all those things that were "shelved". This, according to Kuhn, is how new paradigms are born.
I see a lot of parallels between that idea applied to science and that applied to computer science (or, perhaps, "software development technology"). We have a class of probelms that are fairly readily solved with existing technologies, but we keep hitting "shelved" problems, so we work to find something that addresses those as well.
I'm reminded of Alan Key's barb about Java being dangerous because it makes new ideas look like old ones. Perhaps that's also why Java has been so quickly adopted.
Heh... one could say just as easily that it makes old ideas look like new ones :) One could say this of Linux, as well (he says, running Linux everywhere, but still wanting more).
self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org
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cramakrishnan＠acm.org -
Tripp Lilley