Hilaire,
Sorry for a bit late.
This is a serious and impressive work. However, for OLPC, I feel
Please tell me if the OLPC is responsive enough with a complex interactive drawing. I am curious.
It is quite ok. I have bunch of stuff in DrGeo window, and create a script for a point and change its coordianate repeatedly by ticking the script. I get 15-19 fps, for example.
that many Pythonists are contemplating similar systems. (We have yet
contemplating = admiring?
"thinking silently", but I figured that my usage was not correct.
I meant that Pythonists are thinking without making a lot of discussions except a little bit on the python edu-sig mainling list, which is... quite uninformative^^;)
Once upon a time I use Python and I also wrote articles about Python programming in LinuxFocus online magazine[1] and I can quite objectively write that Squeak and Python are not playing in the same conceptual plane when it is about education oriented application development.
One long term "hope", "goal", or whatever that some of the members at OLPC have is to make the laptop a "python" machine. Like Lisp machines or Smalltalk machines in the past but done "for" and "in" Python. In that setting, pushing a different language has always some implications. Kind of the same discussion again, but it is not about which is good/not good at what.
As in Sciences, the things are not compartmented. There are conceptual bridges between mathematics and physics, geometry and optics, geometry and physics, etc. Everything is conceptually connected. Concerning education and computer use, and in particularly microworld system, it is very important to have such system interconnected. It helps to make kids to think in system where things are connected like objects in the real world. And moreover it gives to teachers and kids the opportunity to build easily interconnected simulation systems. In education we suffer to much about compartmented teaching, probably because teachers do not communicate enough among them.
Yes.
Such microworld system could be about many of the sciences fields: optics, physics, mechanic, electricity, chemistry, geometry (DrGeoII is such a system). EToys itself is a general microworld system. In this vision the glue/link component between these microworld is the EToys scripting system itself.
And, yes.
-- Yoshiki