On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 14:12 +0700, Serge Stinckwich wrote:
> 2009/5/18 Séverin Lemaignan <skadge at gmail.com>:
> > 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.
> 
> 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.

I'm new here. Not to Smalltalk, but that's another long story. I am
trying to understand Squeak as an educational tool, and Etoys.

I am a big fan of FreeBSD and am running Squeak 3.9 on FreeBSD 7.1 and
Gnome 2.4. Is there something else I need to learn about and develop
Etoys? There is no Etoys port in the ports tree.

What does the web browser plug-in do? When I try to sample Etoys on the
web site I am told I need the plug-in, yet one does not exist for
FreeBSD. Is the Etoys system designed so only developers can build the
apps, and students just play with the results via a web browser? Or is
the idea to offer an alternative to installing Squeak, to reach a wider
audience? If I have Squeak installed, do I need the browser plug-in?

Taking a step back, I have noticed that Squeak has gotten a lot more
complex than the Smalltalk I worked with so many years ago. (Hint: it
ran on Windows 3.1. Very slowly!) So complex that it may be
inappropriate even for high school students. In this sense has it lost
sight of Alan Kay's Dynabook? Sorry if this is a recurring issue. Again,
my excuse is that I am new here!

-- 
Gary Dunn, Honolulu
osp at aloha.com
http://openslate.net/
http://e9erust.blogspot.com/
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