Designing Learning Technology

Tue, 06 May 2003

Whyville in the news
The Miami Herald ran a story on Whyville recently. Whyville is an interesting success story in how to create a vibrant online community for young girls, although it wasn't originally intended to serve that demographic. Still, 45 million page views a month for a site that's fundamentally about science education is awfully impressive.

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The evolution of computer languages
Two related stories point to the ways that computer programming languages change over time. Paul Graham discusses what computer languages might be like one hundred years from now, and speculates about which current languages will die out, and which will evolve into something new. He points out how, with ever-increasing hardware performance, languages have become about doing things easily instead of doing things fast. Looking back into languages' evolutionary tree, Robert Glass laments the shift away from domain-specific languages (sorry, you need to be an ACM member to read this one) to the general-purpose, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink languages we use today, and argues that domain-specific languages still have a place in the designer's toolbox.

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