[Etoys] What now ?

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
> <straightThoughMode>
> 
> I always feel sad how OLPC missed the Smalltalk/Morph/Etoys
> opportunity, both from the technical point of view but also and more
> importantly from the educative point of view.

I hope you are aware that I have been developing a Smalltalk-only
computer for education for many years (way before OLPC was started).
Until a couple of months ago it was just me and I was working on my own
Neo Smalltalk design, but currently there is a growing group around the
project and the focus is now Squeak.

Please note that the Sugar project has my full support, as do the OLPC
hardware projects (both the current one and the future XO-2). No
solution is perfect and we need to offer the teachers and children
alternatives.

You have already mentioned several advantages of a Squeak machine and I
agree, which is why I have been working on it. Another advantage is the
possibility of costing less - while some people are feeling contrained
by the 256MB in the XO-1 it is easy to imagine SqueakNOS running on 64MB
or less, for example. A custom Squeak processor should use up less
energy to get the same result as a x86 with a software VM.

The most obvious problem of a Squeak-only machine is that you wouldn't
have Firefox nor OpenOffice. I am typing this in the Squeak email
client, Celeste, and it is pretty crude compared to Kmail and others.
And Etoys itself is "the demo that wouldn't die" which we hope can be
improved considerably. So we will need to invest heavily to clean things
up before this can be an acceptable alternative to Sugar/"normal"
Linux/Mac/Windows. It is part of our plan to get funds to allow us to do
so.

-- Jecel