[squeak-dev] Etoys 2 (was: Updating key morphic/etoy features in the main Squeak release)

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Thu Mar 19 21:42:01 UTC 2009


Bert Freudenberg wrote on Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:03:44 +0100
> Anyway, merging the latest Etoys back into a squeak.org release will  
> probably take a while. Well, unless we find enough volunteers with  
> copious amounts of spare time ;)

Since we do lack resources to do even this, I have been reluctant to
start a discussion about the future of Etoys. But you never know when
new resources might become available, so it is good to be prepared.

My own position about Etoys is that it is a very integral part of Squeak
and not some application running on top of it. That doesn't mean that I
wouldn't be very happy to have images that didn't include it, but I also
sometimes need images without SystemBrowser and Compiler or without any
networking stuff at all. This is an issue of modularity and that is not
where I want this thread to go.

Scratch is so similar to Etoys but is also complementary in many ways.
It has been far more successful with younger children or with more
casual users (I would have thought that explict loops instead of the
"ticking clock" would be harder for these groups, which shows the
importance of testing rather than depending on my own opinions).

On the other hand, Elements by Jens Moenig takes the Scratch-style
interface closer to regular Smalltalk. I have not tested it myself, but
what I have seen seems very reasonable. It makes me think that an Etoys
2 could be possible by borrowing pieces from Scratch, Etoys 1 and
Elements.

A very important part of Etoys to me is Kedama. In a very short paper
(http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2008002_massParallel.pdf), Yoshiki speculates
about what a Kedama 2 should be like. I have a very strong opinion about
that - we should present the parallelism model from APL (see FScript) as
the generalization of the current ConnectionMachine model (SIMD).
Instead of having the turtles be from different classes, you put them in
different groups (with a single turtle able to belong to multiple
groups) and then send messages to the groups.

The idea is to reduce the gap between "loose objects" and Kedama, to
extend Etoys down to the Scratch level and to extend Etoys up to the
full Smalltalk level.

The main incompatibility between Scratch and Etoys that | am aware of is
that the former uses drag-n-drop exclusively while the latter builds
expressions with tiny menus. Are there other issues? And should I have
included other mailing lists in this dicussion?

-- Jecel




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