Hello!
Will Etoys ever merge into mainline Squeak (say in Squeak 4.0).
Not in 4.0 yet. But in the long term I hope that Squeakland Etoys will again at least share a base with the squeak.org release, and possibly even be one flavor of it. Ideas welcome.
Concerning this merging aspect: I was last Saturday doing workshops to present Squeak to teachers of the Toulouse region, in France. While I'm a Squeak user since some years now, I decided this time to use the Etoys 3.0 image on normal Ubuntus, to "see" how teachers would react.
The result is clear: Etoys is *much* simpler to use for teachers than Squeak 3.10. Bigger icons, a lot of things useless for end-user removed, much harder to "mess" the image with unexpected windows everywhere, a lot of extremely relevant examples of projects, etc. And translations in a lot of language are available. I will probably promote from now on this Etoys image amongst the teachers.
So my questions are: - what is today the focus of the main Squeak images? education? research? is it meant to stay in developer hands? - what is the mid-term vision? merging with Etoys? - where should I contribute, as someone mostly interested in a concrete use of Squeak with the kids?
Greetings, Severin