Hi Daniel,

> Hi. I think the multiple viewpoints idea is correct, but I 
> disagree that there should be a progression from Learners to
> Programmers (EToys to Morphic) - part of our audience is
> experienced programmers of other languages who may or may
> not have interest in EToys.

I couldn't possibly disagree more here ;) For one thing as you (correctly)
state it is only "part" of our audience which are experienced programmers -
but what about the rest? Wouldn't we want them to progress from one level to
another?! To me this sounds a bit like proclaiming well, let's not think
about how to learn Squeak programming - only part of our audience is
interested in this and "we" really should be looking at VMs only ;-)

Secondly, unless you are looking at long-term Smalltalkers, many of the
people (including experienced Smalltalkers) will have that feel of being
completely lost in the system with no graceful way of explaining it to them.
To get a taste of what I am talking about look at something like Rebol which
has a sufficiently different POV to give you a real headache when you first
look at it ;-) (alternatively, try a bit of 6502 assembly some time ;) It
would be incredible valuable for us if we had indeed a progression which
allows us to say something like "new to Squeak? well, try out eToys at first
that'll give you an impression of what this system can do - from here you
can look at X, Y, or Z". If this progression is thought through
appropriately it opens an avenue for much more people getting into Squeak,
using it, improving it.

You can get an idea of how this can work in the Squeakland community - as
people get more and more experienced, they want to do more things and some
of them (due to the lack of a well thought-out progression only a few)
actually start to pop up the hood (there's a little button in eToys
scriptors which allow you to switch from tiles to text) and start working in
the Smalltalk environment. And mind you - we talk about educators which
actually could help spread the word, get new people into the community, some
of which in turn might (with the help of such a progression) be the ones
that fix the VM bugs some day.

The progression "from eToys to Morphic" (which I really see as a metaphor
for getting into the system - perhaps you are taking it too literally) is
all about the learning curve - not having one means that you have that
initial huge step which pretty much only experienced programmers can master
and many of them will have too many prejudices to accept any system that
isn't named after a drink. So if you want to be serious about Squeak as a
platform with lots of people coming in instead of staying in a tiny niche
you need to think about some kind of progression. The eToy progression just
happens to be a nice one as it allows you to try out lots of things without
making the "easy things hard" (such as having to remember selectors, class
names, or syntax) without preventing you from learning it when you're ready.
It gives you a cool place to start with where the payoffs are very direct
... and once you learned Morphic all the way down there's really no aspect
of Squeak remaining which you (either would or should) be scared about ;-)

Cheers,
  - Andreas