(Before I ask my question, I gotta say: "WOW!  The new syntax looks 
SO interesting!  Very inviting!  And the fact that I can switch 
back-and-forth makes for a terrific way of moving scaffolding 
in-and-out!)

>
>    Now, I should confess that I have thought for many years that menu
>items SHOULD generally be actual statements in the programming language,
>because of the beautiful bridging that is possible. In fact, I would like
>to derive object-specific menus as filterings of their class interface ....
>This was done once at PARC as one of the first uses of MVC, and was quite
>compelling (again, to me at least).
>     To me this means that a "language for most" should be as much for
>READING as it is for WRITING.
>     But learning programming is partially about the UI for it, and as
>Andreas Raab has pointed out, the syntax of the language is definitely part
>of the UI, and should be treated with the same respect that eventually has
>to be given to the UI.

Alan, as you well know, these are the kinds of arguments that Andy 
diSessa has been making about Boxer for many years.  Andy has been 
working toward the dream of defining and supporting "computational 
literacy."  (I'm reading Andy's new book these days, which has been 
keeping Boxer forward in my thinking lately.)

Boxer has Logo's syntax, with the exception that "blocks" (defined in 
Logo with [square brackets] as in Smalltalk) are graphical "boxes" on 
the screen.  Menu's in Boxer are literally just Boxer statements that 
you can click on to execute them -- literally, boxes, blocks, and 
menus are all the same things.

Do you see Squeak moving toward a Boxer-like mixture of graphical 
elements plus textual elements, in order to realize this vision of 
bridging between UI and programming?

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html