2009/5/18 Séverin Lemaignan skadge@gmail.com:

Hello!

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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.

I'm a bit pessismistic about a future merge ... because the concerns of the different communities (educators, developpers, ...) are very different. Nevertheless, there are various efforts with Squeak 3.11/4.0 and Pharo 1.0, to have a more bug-prone, small kernel. So maybe in the future, Etoys could be based on one of theses initiatives.

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.

I think it's a good idea.

So my questions are:

• what is today the focus of the main Squeak images? education?

research? is it meant to stay in developer hands?

In developer hand i guess.

• 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?

http://squeakland.org/ is the place for all the Etoys activities.

Best regards,