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Check out "Scratch" from MIT:
http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/llk/scratch/index.htm l
which is based off of:
http://www.squeakland.org/

The squeak smalltalk VM can run on the more machine archs than any thing else, puts Java to shame.

Squeak is a cross-platform Smalltalk environment that has a lot of features for non-programmers: For example, it is it's own IDE. For another, it's got lots of different drag-and-droppable widget things that can be programmed (graphically, even). In fact, it's mostly designed for education (computer science and otherwise).

"Sure, Mac OS X is a great OS that just works. Sure its a real steal at no cost. But for kids, the cost of the OS doesnt matter. The fact that it just works is good. But what they really want to do is get into the internals and rip it apart to see what makes it tick. What better candidate than something that's open source?"

It depends on what the goal of providing kids with cheap computers is.

If the goal is for the kids to use the computers as tools to use in school to learn non-computer subjects, MacOS X with the bundled applications (iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, graphing calculator, etc.) provides fantastic learning tools. Though I'm far from sure that $100 computers could be used for photo and video editing. Of course, the availability of thousands of educational programs for the Mac would certainly make the computers more useful for general education than a Linux computer (which has relatively little educational software available).

If the goal is for the kids to learn about computers, Linux is an OK answer. Since all of the source is available (though you won't be recompiling the entire OS and application stack on an $100 computer, so this is somewhat academic), it's a bit better than MacOS X on this score, where most of the environment is OSS, but with a proprietary framework and many applications). But from the perspective of being a software environment that's open for exploration, Linux or Mac OS X can't hold a candle to Squeak Smalltalk (http://www.squeak.org/).

I suspect that the reason that they turned down Apple wasn't because of what teachers or students want or need, but the goals of the people running the project. They (I am guessing) really want to create an open source consumer platform, and this "education" strategy is a way that they've picked to bypass Microsoft's dominance of the desktop OS market. I suspect that they picked the goal of $100 total cost including the OS, storage, etc., because it precludes x86 CPU's and Windows licensing costs and resources, so MS is excluded by definition. So if your goal is to jump-start OSS as a consumer platform, you won't want to use Apple's proprietary OS even if that would be better for the teachers and students, because it doesn't achieve your real goal. That's not to say that this goal isn't legitimate (in the long run, you could argue that jump-starting OSS on the desktop is good for everyone), but it's a long-term strategic goal that is more important to Red Hat, for example, and makes the computer much less useful for students and teachers for the next few years. I suspect that Apple knew that their offer couldn't be accepted by Red Hat (who wants Linux) or MIT (who wants a "clean slate" for research), but felt that it was better to make the offer than not.

Whatever the reasons, if they don't want to use the best OS for religious/strategic reasons, they really should consider Squeak Smalltalk as a platform. It has some advantages over the traditional Linux application stack:
- Smalltalk was designed and has been used for educational purposes for three decades. Squeak Smalltalk in particular is a fantastic teaching environment. There are all sorts of powerful components available (e.g. http://www.opencroquet.org/, a distributed 3D environment, http://www.squeakland.org/ which has tons of great code generated by students and teachers, http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essay s.html, which documents a huge number of educational projects based on Squeak Smalltalk, etc.).
- Squeak is completely open source, written in itself. This makes it much easier to understand than all of the layered technologies that are "Linux", which makes it more useful for students.
- Squeak is far more resource efficient than the full Linux application stack. It can run over Linux, or Windows, or MacOS X, or WinCE, or even without

"Sure, Mac OS X is a great OS that just works. Sure its a real steal at no cost. But for kids, the cost of the OS doesnt matter. The fact that it just works is good. But what they really want to do is get into the internals and rip it apart to see what makes it tick. What better candidate than something that's open source?"

It depends on what the goal of providing kids with cheap computers is.

If the goal is for the kids to use the computers as tools to use in school to learn non-computer subjects, MacOS X with the bundled applications (iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, graphing calculator, etc.) provides fantastic learning tools. Though I'm far from sure that $100 computers could be used for photo and video editing. Of course, the availability of thousands of educational programs for the Mac would certainly make the computers more useful for general education than a Linux computer (which has relatively little educational software available).

If the goal is for the kids to learn about computers, Linux is an OK answer. Since all of the source is available (though you won't be recompiling the entire OS and application stack on an $100 computer, so this is somewhat academic), it's a bit better than MacOS X on this score, where most of the environment is OSS, but with a proprietary framework and many applications). But from the perspective of being a software environment that's open for exploration, Linux or Mac OS X can't hold a candle to Squeak Smalltalk (http://www.squeak.org/).

I suspect that the reason that they turned down Apple wasn't because of what teachers or students want or need, but the goals of the people running the project. They (I am guessing) really want to create an open source consumer platform, and this "education" strategy is a way that they've picked to bypass Microsoft's dominance of the desktop OS market. I suspect that they picked the goal of $100 total cost including the OS, storage, etc., because it precludes x86 CPU's and Windows licensing costs and resources, so MS is excluded by definition. So if your goal is to jump-start OSS as a consumer platform, you won't want to use Apple's proprietary OS even if that would be better for the teachers and students, because it doesn't achieve your real goal. That's not to say that this goal isn't legitimate (in the long run, you could argue that jump-starting OSS on the desktop is good for everyone), but it's a long-term strategic goal that is more important to Red Hat, for example, and makes the computer much less useful for students and teachers for the next few years. I suspect that Apple knew that their offer couldn't be accepted by Red Hat (who wants Linux) or MIT (who wants a "clean slate" for research), but felt that it was better to make the offer than not.

Whatever the reasons, if they don't want to use the best OS for religious/strategic reasons, they really should consider Squeak Smalltalk as a platform. It has some advantages over the traditional Linux application stack:
- Smalltalk was designed and has been used for educational purposes for three decades. Squeak Smalltalk in particular is a fantastic teaching environment. There are all sorts of powerful components available (e.g. http://www.opencroquet.org/, a distributed 3D environment, http://www.squeakland.org/ which has tons of great code generated by students and teachers, http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essay s.html, which documents a huge number of educational projects based on Squeak Smalltalk, etc.).
- Squeak is completely open source, written in itself. This makes it much easier to understand than all of the layered technologies that are "Linux", which makes it more useful for students.
- Squeak is far more resource efficient than the full Linux application stack. It can run over Linux, or Windows, or MacOS X, or WinCE, or even without

SmallTalk could be a good option.

Squeak is a SmallTalk implementation: http://www.squeak.org/

http://www.squeakland.org/ has a whole load of resources for teachers and students.

Squeak http://www.squeak.org/
Croquet http://opencroquet.org/
eToys http://squeakland.org/

Proably wont win any karma for saying this but what exactly has Alan Kay done in like the last 20 years.

Squeak http://www.squeak.org/
Croquet http://opencroquet.org/
eToys http://squeakland.org/

Educators, generals, dieticians, psychologists, and parents program. Armies, students, and some societies are programmed. (...)
Every computer program is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process.

we just don't give nine year olds enough credit.

I think it's marvelous that this kid is so into it, I think she's had wonderful support from her environment. I also think it's great she's "starting her professional life" with C#, not C.

Luckily, Seymour Papert's dream is alive and thriving, and not everyone treats kids as stupid little people. See Squeakland. They're using Squeak Smalltalk in an environment where "(...) kids in fifth and sixth grade learn to simulate gravity and use differential equations in a context much different from most math taught today." There's more here: http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essay s.html and specially the essay How We Learn

This is so much better than Turtle walking! :-)

we just don't give nine year olds enough credit.

I think it's marvelous that this kid is so into it, I think she's had wonderful support from her environment. I also think it's great she's "starting her professional life" with C#, not C.

Luckily, Seymour Papert's dream is alive and thriving, and not everyone treats kids as stupid little people. See Squeakland. They're using Squeak Smalltalk in an environment where "(...) kids in fifth and sixth grade learn to simulate gravity and use differential equations in a context much different from most math taught today." There's more here: http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essay s.html and specially the essay How We Learn

This is so much better than Turtle walking! :-)

we just don't give nine year olds enough credit.

I think it's marvelous that this kid is so into it, I think she's had wonderful support from her environment. I also think it's great she's "starting her professional life" with C#, not C.

Luckily, Seymour Papert's dream is alive and thriving, and not everyone treats kids as stupid little people. See Squeakland. They're using Squeak Smalltalk in an environment where "(...) kids in fifth and sixth grade learn to simulate gravity and use differential equations in a context much different from most math taught today." There's more here: http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essay s.html and specially the essay How We Learn

This is so much better than Turtle walking! :-)

I stumbled on squeak looking for some smalltalk tools.

From there I found squeakland ~ a media authoring tool with browser front end.

• '... Math and Science literacy has been devalued in our schools, or at best inappropriately taught. And yet it's vital, not just for vocational reasons, but to develop critical thinking skills needed by all world citizens. Based on a constructivist learning model, Squeak school examples show surprising ways of reaching math and science resistance and helping children develop powerful thinking skills. ...' Alan Keys, BACKGROUND ON HOW CHILDREN LEARN

The people behind squeak are impressive. What is more impressive is the ideas behind how kids learn.

Now I've just got to model the experiment I conducted with the young ones on the speed of maggots wriggling and their weird behaviour when you rotate the surface they are crawling on (they instantly seem to know which way is facing down).

I stumbled on squeak looking for some smalltalk tools.

From there I found squeakland ~ a media authoring tool with browser front end.

• '... Math and Science literacy has been devalued in our schools, or at best inappropriately taught. And yet it's vital, not just for vocational reasons, but to develop critical thinking skills needed by all world citizens. Based on a constructivist learning model, Squeak school examples show surprising ways of reaching math and science resistance and helping children develop powerful thinking skills. ...' Alan Keys, BACKGROUND ON HOW CHILDREN LEARN

The people behind squeak are impressive. What is more impressive is the ideas behind how kids learn.

Now I've just got to model the experiment I conducted with the young ones on the speed of maggots wriggling and their weird behaviour when you rotate the surface they are crawling on (they instantly seem to know which way is facing down).

I stumbled on squeak looking for some smalltalk tools.

From there I found squeakland ~ a media authoring tool with browser front end.

• '... Math and Science literacy has been devalued in our schools, or at best inappropriately taught. And yet it's vital, not just for vocational reasons, but to develop critical thinking skills needed by all world citizens. Based on a constructivist learning model, Squeak school examples show surprising ways of reaching math and science resistance and helping children develop powerful thinking skills. ...' Alan Keys, BACKGROUND ON HOW CHILDREN LEARN

The people behind squeak are impressive. What is more impressive is the ideas behind how kids learn.

Now I've just got to model the experiment I conducted with the young ones on the speed of maggots wriggling and their weird behaviour when you rotate the surface they are crawling on (they instantly seem to know which way is facing down).

I stumbled on squeak looking for some smalltalk tools.

From there I found squeakland ~ a media authoring tool with browser front end.

• '... Math and Science literacy has been devalued in our schools, or at best inappropriately taught. And yet it's vital, not just for vocational reasons, but to develop critical thinking skills needed by all world citizens. Based on a constructivist learning model, Squeak school examples show surprising ways of reaching math and science resistance and helping children develop powerful thinking skills. ...' Alan Keys, BACKGROUND ON HOW CHILDREN LEARN

The people behind squeak are impressive. What is more impressive is the ideas behind how kids learn.

Now I've just got to model the experiment I conducted with the young ones on the speed of maggots wriggling and their weird behaviour when you rotate the surface they are crawling on (they instantly seem to know which way is facing down).

My recommendation for the kids is to have them see very basic principles in BASIC ...

GAAAaaahhhhhh!

Quick - learn smalltalk and tote along some toys from Squeakland.

The next generation will thank you someday ...

Squeak is an environment that is meant, among other things, to be used to teach children about programming and computers.

It's difficult to explain what it does. If I understand correctly, it is at the same time a "personal 3D environment" which can be shared, a customizable programming environment, a kind of window manager, and a teaching tool.

The special thing about it is that any part of the environment can be edited on the fly, and reprogrammed/modified. This was demonstrated by Alan Kay at his Turing Award Lecture last year. There is a stream of the lecture, although it doesn't work for me right now. The most impressive parts of the demo were near the end, so you might want to watch the parts in reverse order (or watch all of it, it was really good).

There are some examples of simple apps that can be created in the Squeak environment on the website, these should be just the right thing to impress the kids.

Squeak is an environment that is meant, among other things, to be used to teach children about programming and computers.

It's difficult to explain what it does. If I understand correctly, it is at the same time a "personal 3D environment" which can be shared, a customizable programming environment, a kind of window manager, and a teaching tool.

The special thing about it is that any part of the environment can be edited on the fly, and reprogrammed/modified. This was demonstrated by Alan Kay at his Turing Award Lecture last year. There is a stream of the lecture, although it doesn't work for me right now. The most impressive parts of the demo were near the end, so you might want to watch the parts in reverse order (or watch all of it, it was really good).

There are some examples of simple apps that can be created in the Squeak environment on the website, these should be just the right thing to impress the kids.

Kay works a lot on new ideas, many of them being incorporated into Squeak and Croquet. The ideas are still rough, though, so in some cases I don't know if I'd say they were accessible yet. Such is the nature of research. (But even kids are using Squeak.)

"Where is the development environment that is as simple to use as lego blocks which anyone over the age of 6 can use to quickly create powerful apps?"

Of course there is.

And for the big boys, there is this.

While Squeak, as in the e-Toys environment, as its name implies, is a plaything, but it's a pretty good plaything none the less. It leads directly on to the commercial Smalltalks which are arguably the premier 'productivity' language. Onward links include:-

1. Squeakland for the e-Toys.
2. Squeak Smalltalk The Language itself.
3. The Smalltalk Community Portal
4. SmalltalkX A brilliant super-fast implementation.
5. Cincom Smalltalk The direct decendant from the original Xerox PARC version.

Designed for kids education (see eToys) by Alan Kay and others. See http://squeakland.org/ and http://www.squeakland.org/kids/kidshome.html.

Designed for kids education (see eToys) by Alan Kay and others. See http://squeakland.org/ and http://www.squeakland.org/kids/kidshome.html.

Squeak is a great development tool, but for young people, the Squeakland team led by Alan Kay is doing fantastic things. I teach my 8th grade programming class using Squeak and also taught a 4th grade computer club Squeak. It was a breeze for them, and they loved it.

I heard his talk entitled, "Introductions To Computing Should Be Child's Play" and he did a demo of Squeak, and it made me feel as giddy as a schoolgirl.

Squeak is a fairly popular approach at the moment. I don't know of any schools that use it directly, but I've run into free camps that promote it. Squeak is a platform-independent Smalltalk, but when teachers say "Squeak" they mean the e-toys framework for building little interactive applets. IMO it's an interesting little system, but fairly awkward to pick up.

For older kids, the game-oriented BASICs give quick results--things like Blitz Basic, Pure Basic, and Dark Basic. Almost certainly you want to steer kids away from stuff from the dark ages, like the Linux command line, makefiles, gcc, etc. I know, I know, lots of geeky types are going to hate that suggestion. But stop, take a step back, and just see the reactions you get to that stuff. It's not that it's unusable, just that it feels so awkward and out of place in the modern world. Show someone DrScheme, for example, and then show someone Emacs and makefiles. Your student will be horrified at the latter two.

What I think would be good is to make use of one of the simulation environments around like eToys or Stagecast. Something where you focus on making stuff - not typing endless boilerplate.

Programming as a skill for its own sake isn't worth teaching in highschool. Its not even a marketable skill in the US anymore.

"...as well as what it would take to create a vibrant learning environment using an open source architecture."

http://www.squeakland.org/

Why bother? The point is not to teach them industry skills, but rather to impart on people "a rudimentary, working knowledge of computer programming", so why hobble them with ugly, broken, inconsistent syntax? Why not use a language which has had teaching in mind from the get-go? After all, there's a reason things like Logo, Basic, and Hypercard are/were popular... because they're easy to learn and it's easy to produce really cool things quickly and with relatively little effort.\

<a href="http://www.squeakland.org/">Squeakland</a&gt ;

<URL:http://www.squeakland.org/>

<a href="http://www.squeakland.org/">Squeakland</a&gt ;

<URL:http://www.squeakland.org/>

Let them run amuck in a Squeak environment. There are a ton of educational resources over at SqueakLand. It's a multimedia platform and a programming environment.

It seems that all Computer Scientists of a previous generations, like Don Knuth, Alan Kay, and of course myself all play the pipe organ.

I don't know why the current generation of Computer Scientists don't.

Teach them Smalltalk. And before you say no, remember that Alan Kay designed it for children to use.

The Alto was a neat machine. I've programmed one in Mesa, and I visited PARC in 1975, long before Jobs.

I wasn't there, but I don't think your facts are entirely correct.

Alan Kay referred to the Alto as the "Interim Dynabook". What he had in mind was a laptop. The original Dynabook paper has a picture of a woman sitting on grass using a laptop. It's a cardboard mockup. Todays laptops are less bulky and about a thousand times more powerful than what Kay had in mind. Cheaper, too; Kay wanted to reach the price point of a grand piano. He had a clear vision on the hardware front.

No laptop on the market is as thin and light as the cardboard model, though they are often smaller in the other dimensions since they fold. Kay was thinking about the early 1980s, so the fact that they are much faster than his estimates is to be expected. About cost, if you read his original papers he claimed that in the future it was likely that companies would give away the hardware for free to sell content. The Alto of the early 1970s was, of course, very expensive.

The first attempt to turn this technology into a product was the 8086 based Notetaker in 1978, which I doubt would have cost as much as a piano (or the 1981 Xerox Star).

What wasn't right was the emphasis on closed systems. The PARC idea was that it all should just work, and the end user shouldn't have to worry about how it works. Just like Xerox copiers. Out of this mindset came the Xerox Star, Xerox's commercial product. The Star was a networked word processor/office computer networked to file servers and printers. Think of a computer that runs nothing but Microsoft Office and you'll have the right picture. No user-serviceable parts inside.

Smalltalk came with all the sources. I agree that this was because the main company didn't care about it (just like early releases of Unix by Bell Labs). My point is that the people receiving this award can't be blamed for this "feature".

The Macintosh initially only came with MacPaint and MacWrite. They didn't want to scare away third party developers like the Lisa and Star had.

That wasn't the way things went. The CP/M - Apple DOS - PCDOS end of computing won out over PARC elegance. Mostly for cost reasons.

The machine I am typing this on (Linux+KDE) sure looks far more like an Alto than CP/M.

For those interested in a more informed opinion of what happened back then than they are likely to read in Slashdot, check out what Alan Kay said at the Prize ceremony.

Squeak Smalltalk is quite excellent for this purpose, IMHO.

If they have a browser, the kiddies can get the Squeak plugin (Smalltalk), go to Squeakland and have a lot more fun. They can start much younger too.

Java? Sure, but let's see that 31 MB download over Mom and Dad's dialup line. Java is just Smalltalk anyway, with syntactic sugar. -- It's a joke OK?

Definitely... and be sure to take a look at the SqueakLand kids site

1. organize development objectives and set priorities via a single collaboration site so that individual developers can lay some of the bricks in this warm, well-designed, efficient and delightful to live in building.
2. a GUI unification layer which will attempt to transform the chaos of the linux desktop into something like the ease of the MacOS desktop.
3. AI services such as getting some computational linguist nerds together and building desktop computing domain-specific tools.
   
   The goal of AI services would be that linux would understand itself and how all the programs and hardware act, can do some reasoning and enable things like automatic configuration, automatic software search/installation/interworking, agent-assisted development and solution of user-initiated goals, development of personal assistants, and in general making linux something a magnitude beyond other operating systems. In fact parsing and syntactic recognition of written and spoken natural language is here today, but for now still requires experts to spend time creating a domain-specific system.

I have a feeling that the three projects above taken in order could launch linux and open source in general into a totally different strata compared to other software. Just setting up a single website as a clearinghouse for gathering and organizing ideas would be a major step. With such a tool then many people's work could be coordinated within a common map, and the next step (rebuilding the linux user experience, through GUI unification and also using the smarts of experts in this field) is possible.

At the same time a serious effort (step 3) can be made to acheive a linux desktop-centric set of complementary AI services. Here are some goals I can see might make it to the front page:

- We need a place where we can get experts in AI to provide insight. A little goes a long way.

- We need to build a knowledge representation of the world of user computing, from file copying to driver installation problems to word processing. This is one of the resources that will enable machine reasoning to make complicated computers easy to use.

- We need to provide a software framework for various artificial intelligence and natural language processing software tools to plug into.

- We need to find a way to introduce large numbers of non-linux-nerds (designers, technical writers, psychologists, PhDs, manufacturers) into the dialogue for concrete projects. For example a widget manufacturer could provide funding to a small group that would create entries in the knowledge base and so on for their product if it would guarantee plug-and-play compatibility with the reasoning software. - We need a pilot project which will help solidify things we need to have done, for example we could try to incorporate NLP into the shell. A project oriented to the general public might be an onscreen "notebook". Maybe we should be using Squeak? Think about how we can get rid of the infinite number of control panels and buttons, and move toward an interface that would make it fun or easy to use.

- We need to create modular scripts that solve certain user cases and yet can be applied to many different situations. Open source desktop intelligence.

- We need to provide ways allow reasoning engines to be able to do things for the user.

It may sound like this is "silly science" but this is not at all impossible. First, the minimum technology is there already, and what isn't. Second,

You mean like this

"It all sums up to the same issues that squeak smalltalk has: Everything about it is great, but no-one uses it for anything real."

Depends on how you define"Real", but then I guess if it isn't in your face then it's irrelevent.

Squeak smalltalk is a briliant language for smalls. Runs on all small computers under your o/s of choice. Your work will be completely shareable because the Virtual Machine is identical on all hardware platforms. It leads on to the the most productive language ever created.

Squeak smalltalk for kids

Squeak smalltalk for grownups

Smalltalk for business

Smalltalk for engineers - Very fast.

There are many others, have a look through The Smalltalk Portal.

Just remember that with 30 years of developemnt it just works!

It seems that there are two big hurdles that the little coders face these days and it seems that not having a freely available language isn't one of them. There are lots of free quality programming languages complete with extensive tutorials, such as Python (as pointed out by many)or the lesser known but very capable Squeak.

The first hurdle is the education systems vocation focused âoecomputer literacyâ. In the 80's schools really did focus on programming now its focused on learning to use stuff like office programs provided by Microsoft. This trains the student to be a âoeuserâ (as in drug user) rather than master of the computer.

The second hurdle which is hinted at but really spelled out in the article is the operating system and all the other computer components that because of their complexity must be treated as black boxes. Even in the most enlightened Linux using school it is very difficult for the little coders to actually have their programs interact with the hardware directly. While having an operating system is a good thing generally-- it does get in the way when one wants to understand computers at all the levels. Without interacting directly with hardware, students aren't going to have the perspective that brings.

Schools should look beyond programming on desktop computers and use simper devices like Lego Mindstorms or parallax basic stamps which for me solves âoethe Little Coder's Predicamentâ

You'd be surprised what kids can do

Squeak is a cross-platform implementation of smalltalk that has developed quite the little community of educators and students around it. It allows budding programmers to start on a very basic level - something reminiscent of hypercard - but underneath it all is a real language that allows all the power and syntax you might want. As soon as you're ready, the power is there.

The scheme environment bundled with How To Design Programs has a similar goal of allowing the student to gradually ramp up the complexity of the language, but I find their rigid levels confining. Also, the programs a beginning programmer is able to put together are nowhere near as satisfying visually as what a new squeak user can build. (These kids today - in my day, we had either text or 40 by 40 graphics and we liked it.) That said, the htdp scheme environment may be more appropriate for a structured classroom environment with a series of lessons.

My only complaint about squeak is the license (despite claims on squeak.org, it's not really an open source license because of the fonts it includes); however, it is free-as-in-beer and has been already been used in elementary and middle school classrooms for both teacher- and student-created projects. (See squeakland)

Smalltalk, a good tool for kids to learn about computers.

And not just for them ;-)

"Any language that needs an interactive interpreter is TOTALLY unsuited for classrooms."

As I said.
Not everyone agrees with you

I agree with Squeak one can teach some powerful ideas even to kids (which is one of Alan Kay's goals). You can just like Java run applets in your browser.

Also, kids can publish their project to the web, and watch them at home or share with friends, no matter if they have a Mac, Win, Linux machine or whatever. Here are some user-provided projects: gallery

And, of course, this is open source and gratis software :-)

Also, kids can publish their project to the web, and watch them at home or share with friends, no matter if they have a Mac, Win, Linux machine or whatever. Here are some user-provided projects: gallery

And, of course, this is open source and gratis software :-)