Alice and Squeak (was: Tribute To Randy Pausch)

[jecel at merlintec.com]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:21:23 -0700, Noah Kantrowitz wrote:
> I'm pretty sure Squeak, which eToys is based on, has Alice support 
built-in.

This support was dropped a couple of versions ago.

One of the original goals for Squeak was to integrate all sorts of 
interesting educational experiments. Wouldn't it be great to be able to mix 
and match Alice, StarLogo, HyperCard, Vivarium, ThingLab and many others? 
So not only new and interesting things tried in Squeak over the years but 
also classics like these were at least partially reimplmented in Squeak.

The original Alice was an extension of Python (and so would have been 
perfect for the XO if it weren't for its 3D requirements) and was ported to 
Squeak by by Jeff Pierce. Some of that project was known as "Wonderland". 
Around 2002 or 2003 the focus shifted to the Croquet project and its 
TeaTime shared computing model (still keeping the Alice theme). An 
unfortunate side effect of this was that Alice's focus on introduction to 
programming was lost in Croquet, though the long term plan was to include 
"scripting".

Since the developers had moved on, Wonderland suffered bit rot and the 
people releasing newer versions of Squeak decided not to support it any 
longer.

Something that seems very close in spirit to the origina Alice is StarLogo 
NG. But I don't know how open it is nor how well it would work on the XO 
hardware.

-- Jecel
 
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