[Etoys] [squeak-dev] Q: Contributing to Squeak

[Séverin Lemaignan]

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.

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.

So my questions are:
- what is today the focus of the main Squeak images? education?
research? is it meant to stay in developer hands?
- 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?

Greetings,
Severin