OLPC XO OS build 703 has at least two significant changes:
The first is that it automatically suspend when closed, with this caveat:
the system can’t suspend when the USB bus is in use by an external device (unless it’s a USB mass storage device and has been fully allowed to write any cached info and quiesce itself).
This might not seem like a big deal, but folks have been wanting it for a long time.
The second is that activities no longer come pre-installed in the OS image.
Typed Scheme is a typed dialect of PLT Scheme. It integrates with modules written in other PLT dialects, and provides a type system designed to support common Scheme idioms.
Typed Scheme is a pretty neat language because it can can both use and be used by (untyped) Scheme code in PLT Scheme.
See here
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.
This interview with Charles H. Moore is a great read.
I think it behooves new programmers to sample all the languages available. Forth is the only one that’s fun. The satisfaction of finding a neat representation cannot be equaled in Fortran, C or even Lisp.
Well clearly he hasn’t tried out Scheme 🙂
(via Dave)
One man’s vision…
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!
Eli released a library to facilitate interactive debugging in PLT Scheme.
ADDENDUM:11/15/11
Corrected the linked file name.
Check out this list of soft real-time Scheme implementations!
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.)
