-------- Original Message -------- Subject: website contact Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:07:00 -0500 (EST) From: Asaf Yatskan maya.yatskan@012.net.il To: squeakland staff webcontact@squeakland.org
Dear Sir, My name is Asaf. I discovered Squeak and Etoys while helping my son creating programs on the wonderful Scratch programming language. We are creating games on Scratch for about 2 years and it is fun both for me and for him Recently He asked me to learn him a more "grown up" programming language. Since he is almost 9 years old, I have several doubts regarding the programming language that suits for him. I can easily teach him the popular languages such as C++ and Java or even C or I can teach him Etoys and then Squeak which seems to be much more educational I have to admit that squeak is new to me too but from a brief review of the language it seems to be a true object oriented language that I hope lets the programmer enjoy it. Recently I discovered another interesting project which is called Alice; although Alice presents a fascinating way of programming in 3D I am not sure it is the right project to begin programming. After this long introduction I wonder if you can help with some of my doubts and question: 1. What do you think is the most suitable language for 9 years old boy (that is not an English speaker)? 2. Do you think Etoys and Squeak can provide tools for young programmer in the future? 3. I found a nice implementation of Alice in Squeak which is called Alice in Squeakland the implementation was done by Jeff Pierce although it was implemented in Squeak ver. 2.0 I could run on downloadable Squeak ver. 3.10 Are you familiar with Alice implementation on Squeak. Is the squeak still supporting it? Thank you for your time and help Asaf