This demonstration will show you some of the features of the minigrace implementation of Grace as it appears to students, including Grace dialects for supporting specific teaching objectives. This implementation has been used to teach around ten different course offerings; minigrace runs in a web browser, so there is very little overhead for students to get started.

The same implementation can also be run from the Unix command line, where it is used for bootstrapping the minigrace compiler.

My research interests are in the area of programming languages, operating systems, object-oriented systems and distributed computing, and more specifically in the region where they overlap (such as language design for distributed Object-oriented computing.) My favorite system for trying out ideas was for many years Squeak Smalltalk; I was an active worker on Traits, along with with the folks from SCG in Bern. I’m a co-author of two books on Smalltalk programming, Squeak by Example, and Pharo By Example. For the last five years I’ve been engaged in developing the Grace programming language, an object-oriented programing language designed for teaching novices. See gracelang.org for details.