[Bluej-discuss] Open Source

[Aryeh M. Friedman]

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Lon Levy wrote:
>
> As a high school computer science teacher, there are many things that I
> want an IDE to do for my students.  Equally important are the things
> that I do NOT want it to do.  I know that some of these are
> controversial items where we can professionally disagree as to the

There is nothing that prevents such modifications now (as plug ins)...
all going FOSS/Dual License/SIW/whatever is makes the process slightly
more organized (and controllable due to certain emergent properties of
these models).
> merits.
>
> I do not want my beginning students to have code completion.  I want
> them to think things through and use the API ... not have the selection
> offered to them.  I don't want a pop up wizard offering creation of a
> method they are invoking that does not yet exist or creation of a class
> that they are trying to instantiate.  I want my students to learn to
> think for themselves before they are offered fantastic tools like these
> in a advanced user/professional IDE.

It is your lab right???? if so who says you need to allow any of
this... if the student *REALLY* wants this stuff at home they will
find a way to do it with or without BJ... there is nothing in the
licensing structure that would allow/disallow this.

A personal note I learned BJ when I went back to school (three years
ago) to finally get my degree (after 15 years in the industry) and
found it to be the only IDE I could tolerate because it had none of
these features.   I continue to use it for my professional work
because it keeps it's promise of KISS (eclipse for example is horrible
here).   So for the most part I do command line programming for
comfort and legal reasons (certain licenses make it impossible to do
SIW work with tools developed under them) but I do almost all my
prototyping on BJ (the class diagram is "just enough" and superior to
most class browsers in presentation to be very useful.... note to team
it would be nice to be able to collapse/hide clusters of classes in
the class browser)
>
> If BlueJ goes open source, then you are free to create the tools that I
> want to keep away from my students for a while.  This would undermine
> the learning process for those students who are already adept at
> searching the web for tools written by others, but not yet knowledgeable
> enough to do these tasks for themselves.

I completely fail to see how this is any different then the situation
now and/or would be made worse by allowing people to look at modify
the source code (the business aspects of this is the only place where
the different license models differ).

- --
Aryeh M. Friedman
Developer, not business, friendly
http://www.flosoft-systems.com
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