Eben Upton: An educational life of Pi (The H)
The H interviews Raspberry Pi Foundation executive director Eben Upton about the educational mission of the foundation—something that got a bit lost in the excitement over the hardware.
"The nice thing is that almost all of the good CS teaching software already runs on Linux, so the bulk of the work is in making sure it works well on the Pi, rather than developing things from a standing start. MIT Scratch is actually a great example of this – it's built on top of the Squeak Smalltalk VM, and because this has generally only been run in anger on modern desktop hardware there hasn't previously been a case for heavy optimisation of its graphics routines, so it's a little sluggish on the Pi right now. We've commissioned a couple of pieces of work, the first of which involves porting it to use Pixman as its rendering backend, and the second involves optimising Pixman itself for the Pi's ARMv6 architecture (which will obviously pay dividends elsewhere in the system too)."