[Squeakland] Making a Copy of an eToy from a script and using the mouse pointer to activate an eToy script
Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas
offray.luna at javeriana.edu.co
Tue Nov 14 13:08:02 PST 2006
Hi Scott :),
Scott Wallace escribió:
[...]
> Hi, Offray!
>
> Once you have typed in textual code for a script, you cannot return to
> tile mode without losing the textual code you typed. There is no
> automatic translation from user-entered textual code back into etoy
> tiles. Indeed, the constructs supported by etoy tiles represent but a
> tiny fraction of what can be expressed in textual Smalltalk code.
>
> Some people are quite disappointed, and even offended, when they first
> learn this brutal fact. But "etoys" is a tile-scripting system, with
> severe and intentional limits to vocabulary, sentence structure,
> expression structure, and control structures. The textual-scripting
> alternative provides nothing more than a "keyhole" which allows some
> people to "escape" from tiles, into textual Smalltalk programming,
> specifically to program things that cannot be expressed with tiles.
Well... its a shame for that people. I'm quite happy with Squeak as a
whole (including this community). Knowing Squeak is some kind of life
changing experience and I can understand the limitations of eToys for
the sake of the learning process of its primary users. Me and my class
have enjoyed a lot the eToys system... and now we're going to textual
scripting with happiness :).
>
> Because reverting from a textually-entered script back to tiles is
> destructive, the user is presented with a warning if he tries to do it
> -- a stern warning that any code he has manually entered via the
> keyboard for this script will be lost.
>
> The reason why this warning was not presented when you tried to click
> the text/tiles checkbox of the #chooseMessageTarget script to revert
> to tiles is because of a bug that appears when you attempt to toggle a
> textually-coded script which has never had any non-empty tile code.
> (I have a fix for that bug, which I'm about to publish to the
> Squeakland alpha update stream.)
¿So, you created #chooseMessageTarget script without using the visor of
the world?. I see that trying to drag & drop to create a script from any
object's visor gives me and script where I can switch from tiles to text
(destructively) but I can't save the code wrote in text mode. I will try
to see how can I made the same from the recommended bibliography.
[...]
>
> Actually, it's the "chooseClickTarget" which does all the work, and
> which causes the system to "hold its breath".
>
> This breath-holding is not absolutely necessary, it's just that that's
> how the underlying support for morph-picking has always worked in
> Squeak -- i.e. totally modally.
>
> To explore the possibility of relaxing this limitation, I've made a
> suggested fix and included it in the attached revised version #5 of
> the StarLemmings project; in this version, things will continue to
> breathe during target selection. Please try it out and let me know
> what you think.
>
>
¿So, you have (re)implemented chooseClickTarget?. I really need to learn
how to do these things. I will try to browse the docs and FreeBooks you
suggested trying to search the way. The new StarLemming5 its working
like a charm. I will say to my students to reimplement, copy the object
from their project to yours, so we can use the code you provide us for
our lemmings clone :-).
> PS: Just as an aside, I think that perhaps better than trying to
> learn Smalltalk by puzzling over little oddball textual snippets such
> as the one I provided for this project would be to download some of
> the great and free Smalltalk books (including a nice one in Spanish by
> Diego) from Stephane Ducasse's wonderful web site, which you probably
> already know about:
>
> http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/FreeBooks.html
>
>
I have tried those approaches before in the context of the course I
talked in SqueakFest2006 (even consider using the Diego book), but it
seems to me that is not enough continuity of experience from the
perspective of a first approach to programming using eToys and tile
based scripting and the approach suggested by the Books. While eToys are
a good catch for people not familiar with programming in ages from 6 to
100, these books, despite of its excellence and good quality, are too
programmer oriented. It seems that Learning to program with Robots from
Stéphane is a good starting point and bridge in that sense. I have
ordered it via amazon and it will be in a religious holy day here called
"the days of little candles". It's some kind of advance of a Christmas
gift from me to myself ;-). In some metaphoric sense it will be here
just in time to bring some light about teaching Squeak to teenagers in
a fun fashion, as eToys do, but with more extensibility as Smalltalk
do. But your enlightenment and the one of this community has been a
valuable resource and I hope to count with it in the future and share
the light here also. Thanks, as always.
Cheers,
Offray
Pdt: Would be really nice to have something like "Ligth and Matter" [1]
free books for Squeak (in the sense of freedom, not price). I hope to
make some contributions in that sense next semester, from my novice
perspective.
[1] http://www.lightandmatter.com/
[2] http://www.lightandmatter.com/area1why.html
[3] http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/sneaky.html
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