ndreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> I couldn't possibly disagree more here ;) [snip]
Yeah, I misrepresented my point of view.

I have no problem with having *a* transition from eToys to Smalltalk. I
have a problem with converting the minnow swiki to represent it
exclusively, or dominantly. Ideally, we should have multiple transitions
for different people:
- start with eToys for non-programmers
- start with Smalltalk language definition for CS people
- start with the Squeak for Java developers for those...

What I was saying is that I think that the first is handled reasonably
well in squeakland, and that separating the sites is not a bad idea.
Swiki will probably never be quite as friendly to any one POV as a
designed site can be.

However, our current position isn't that we can choose the ideal - our
current position, IMO (after sitting with a friend and looking at it
from a newcomers eyes) is that we have lots of documentation, but its
organization is *horrible*. It almost uniformly is so badly organized as
to give someone from any background the idea that this is not for them.
Some of the persistent problems -
- Documentation pieces are presented in a casual, personal style "A
Newbie's on-going tutorial -- an excellent "give-and-take" project
step-through". The R site nearest equivalent is ""R for Beginners" by
Emmanuel Paradis (PDF [447kB])."
- The tutorials, and even more so, their descriptions, are written in a
style that goes out of date very quickly. " How is this "Swiki" site
implemented? Well, ... An exciting new dimension has recently been added
to the Squeak community with Ward Cunningham's Wiki server concept,".
Yes. The official Squeak documentation page (the first a newcomer is
expected to see anyway) claims that wikis are a new thing. Good
intentions become something interpretable as somewhere between stale and
misleading.
- Multiple TOCs with widely, but non-systematically differing points of
view. (http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/377,
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2983,
http://www.squeak.org/documentation/index.html...). The R site
equivalent is an obiquitous navigation bar with the categories 
Documentation (dead title)
Manuals
FAQs
Contributed
Newsletter
Help Pages
Publications

Under each, you find the appropriate type of documentation, linked in a
uniform style. They don't cater to specific kinds of users
(statistician, programmers...), but they're still well organized enough
that you decide the format you want, go there, browse through one page,
and are likely to find what you need, or be sure its not there.

That's a much less ambitious goal than multiple transition paths - no
new material is needed, just reorganizing the existing stuff. Of course
the two can be complementary - add each transition path as an extra
title.

Daniel

Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> 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