[Squeakland] Principles behind EToys

[subbukk]

On Monday 10 September 2007 10:44 pm, Alan Kay wrote:
> Actually ... Etoys wasn't a "temporary hack" or else it wouldn't work
> so smoothly with so many users around the world. It was a model built
> on top of Squeak with a plan to make a more comprehensive version of
> the model also serve as the base after a few years experience. The
> few years have stretched into 10 years ....
I didn't use hack in a pejorative sense but in the sense of a clever piece of 
coding by an individual (or small team). Apologies if it gave a different 
impression.

The player, costume, tiles, viewers are really neat ideas. The category idea 
seemed incomplete. Some of the controls (e.g. fills, paint controls) came 
across as expedients. Pen, canvas and color swatch, being such fundamental 
and powerful graphical entities, could have been surfaced directly in object 
catalog. Whether such omissions were by design or due to lack of time/funding 
wasn't clear to me.

But then opinions don't need funding :-). On the whole, Etoys is an exciting 
experiment. It brings back fun into programming.

Regards .. Subbu