[Squeakland] Lack of documentation frustrating

Alan Kay alan.kay at squeakland.org
Fri May 25 20:22:29 PDT 2007


Hi --

>Alan Kay wrote:
> >
> > Let's see, Oct 31st 2006 to May 25th 2007 seems to be 7 months, not 18 ...
> >
>
>Sorry, Never was great at math ;)

  ...


>As I mentioned in another message, I was playing with an animation tutorial
>that uses the "holder" morph.  Well I've searched through this forum and the
>wiki and still haven't found anything that documents what a "holder" does or
>the fields that are exposed by it's viewer.

If you want to learn EToys, I strongly suggest going to the 
http://www.squeakland.org site and look at the tutorials. There are 
also some sample chapters from the "Powerful Ideas in the Classroom" 
book, and quite a bit of stuff from the active group in 
Champagne-Urbana. (I think I and several others have already mentioned this.)

Your example below is not in EToys but is in the underlying Squeak. 
There is a lot of Squeak documentation, but not much on how Etoys is 
implemented. But most people who program directly in Squeak use the 
Morphic graphics directly.

Etoys is really a different scheme with a different object and 
graphical semantics. It has some real strengths for children, but 
some real weaknesses for adults, especially somewhat sophisticated 
adults. Since it is aimed at children, this has not been a big problem.

One good ploy (which the children use all the time) is to exploit the 
fact that the underlying player object is essentially the same (i.e. 
highly polymorphic) for all graphical objects in Etoys. So exploring 
the standard viewer categories can be very rewarding. For example, 
one of the things you seek will be found in the viewer category 
called "Scripting". There are script lines to control ticking 
behavior, etc. for all the Etoy objects.

However, as I said, Etoys is not particularly complete -- it's more 
set up to have learnable structures by children. The way I program in 
it (and advise adults to program in it) is to use its features as the 
building blocks available, and this will bring to mind lots of simple 
fun structures, including many important parts of math and science. 
The way to be frustrated in Etoys is to bring a set of C-like or 
Java-like conventions from the outside and try to find the 
equivalents in EToys -- they might or might not be there.

(This was easier advice in the 60s when there were literally about 
3000 different programming languages and hundreds of different ways 
to program. Most people were not surprised if a particular language 
had a different paradigm and were used to simply learning it.)

Cheers,

Alan


At 03:49 PM 5/25/2007, mstram wrote:

>Alan,
>
>
>Alan Kay wrote:
> >
> > Let's see, Oct 31st 2006 to May 25th 2007 seems to be 7 months, not 18 ...
> >
>
>Sorry, Never was great at math ;)
>
>As I mentioned in another message, I was playing with an animation tutorial
>that uses the "holder" morph.  Well I've searched through this forum and the
>wiki and still haven't found anything that documents what a "holder" does or
>the fields that are exposed by it's viewer.
>
>I've also been looking at some of the examples on
>http://community.ofset.org/,
>and trying to use Google translate to figure out what's going on with the
>examples.
>
>E.g. how to coordinate multiple scripts for multiple characters in an
>animation or simulation.
>
>I assume that I can create a 'master' script and then use something like :
>
>==================
>"Master Script"
>
>   currenTime >= nextEventTime ifTrue: [
>
>                 Character1_script : start_ticking  (or whatever the "magic
>word would be)
>
>======
>
>(The logic above is very incomplete .. I'd want to choose from an array of
>characters /classes, what I'm looking for is what is the message to "start
>ticking" to a "tickable" script ;)
>
>I still can't get I.E. to load the plugin, but I figured out how to download
>the .pr files and load them directly into Squeak, so I'm looking at those
>tuorials now.
>
>Mike
>--
>View this message in context: 
>http://www.nabble.com/Lack-of-documentation-frustrating-tf2549935.html#a10811351
>Sent from the SqueakLand mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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