etoys implementation

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Hi, John,

> My only experience with Squeak/eToys up til now was trying it on the
> OLPC as a naive user.  Poking at objects on the screen with the
> handles, since that was the only tutorial offered.  The way the darn
> thing "saved its workspace" in the friggin Journal whenever you tried
> to quit it reminded me of ancient APL interpreters that contained a
> jumble of code and data, and Holger's explanation of why it's
> "non-free" reinforced that.  Of course I have no idea how it's
> actually implemented inside.  (There's apparently no tarball that I
> could unpack and examine to find out, either; I'd have to learn how to
> run their GUI just to look at their implementation.)

  Is this discussion still on whether Etoys can be in Debian?  Whether
it can or cannot doesn't depend on whether Journal is friggn, the way
it saves the workspace content, or the fact that you have to learn how
to run (?) the GUI to look at its implementation.  The fact that you
better to (strictly speaking, you don't have to) use a particular
editor is a requirement?

  (BTW, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Smalltalk_Development_on_XO might be
helpful.  Read SqueakV3.sources as EtoysV3.sources in the page,
though.  http://static.squeak.org/tutorials/BankAccount.html is
obsolete, but a classic tutorial.)

  Lack of some documentation is a problem, but once you know where to
click in the GUI, *all* code are nicely hyperlinked together so that
reading code and learning it becomes so easy and encouraging.  That is
why many developers who used to it lose motivation to write getting
started documents^^;

  It is definitely learnable.  There are many new (young and old)
poeple get interested in Smalltalk all the time and poking around.
Papers are published to prestige and not-so-prestige computer science
conferences constantly on making deep changes to Smalltalk or making
applications, etc.  There are companies that are making products.

  By its nature, it is true that it is much, much easier to get
started when you have somebody who already knows it around but it is
sometimes hard to find such a person.

  But let us not derail the discussion.  This discssion is not about
making you like Etoys/Squeak.

-- Yoshiki