The XO was made for its creators

After using the OLPC XO heavily for the past three weeks for web browsing, pdf reading, and educational game playing (by my 5 year old nephew), I can’t help me get the feeling that the XO was made for its creators, and not for children.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love the thing; but how do you explain to a 5 year old (albeit a very smart one) that he can’t start more than 2 or 3 programs at once because the machine will run out of memory and the CPU will get bogged down?! (An aside, how you explain it is by doing just that, excluding the part about memory and cpu).
The vision of a computer where everything is written in Python and everything is modifiable and maintainable by the user is a fun idea, but only for hackers, aka, the creators. Kids could care less. What they want are programs they can use that work well. Are they getting that right now? Well, they are getting something that works “well enough”, but it seems like the XO creators are painting themselves into a corner here in terms of performance; since the hardware will never get upgraded, the only place they’ve got left to speed things up is in the code, and that seemingly has not been a priority thus far.

Why Computer Science Doesn’t Matter

Why Computer Science Doesn’t Matter is an essay about the lack of computer science in the educational curriculum today, and what can be done about it. They’ve come up with an interesting, and successful, approach.

[I want] to place computing where it belongs: in the hearts and minds of every single student.

Here here!

ypsilon

ypsilon is the implementation of Scheme Programming Language, which conforms to the latest standard R6RS. It achieves a remarkably short GC pause time and the best performance in parallel execution as it implements “mostly concurrent garbage collection”, which is optimized for the multi-core CPU system.

If you are wondering “Why yet another Scheme implementation” you can find the answer here. To sum it up: they require real-time processing speed and can not use Boehm Garbage Collector because they run on arcade consoles or pinball machines, so, they had to start from scratch.

Addendum: 8/2/8

Ypsilon 0.9.6 is the bug fix release. It fixes all bugs reported and found in version 0.9.5. Ypsilon 0.9.6 has passed all 8886 tests in PLT R6RS test suite revision 11016.

(via C.L.S.)

DEFUN08: ACM SIGPLAN 2008 Developer Tracks on Functional Programming

DEFUN 2008 invites functional programmers who know how to solve
problems with functional progamming to give talks and lead tutorials
at the The ICFP Developer Tracks.
We want to know about your favorite programming techniques, powerful
libraries, and engineering approaches you’ve used that the world
should know about and apply to other projects. We want to know how to
be productive using functional programming, write better code, and
avoid common pitfalls.

ICFP08 looks like a lot of fun!
(via PLT)