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

[Serge Stinckwich]

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.

Best regards,
-- 
Serge Stinckwich
UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC), Hanoi, Vietnam
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]
http://doesnotunderstand.org/