Adult etoys - My dear wish

Sorry if you've received this 3 times, it never seemed to appear on the list
the first 2 tries...


Hello all,
I feel compelled to add my point of view due to recent discussions on this
list; I have kept quiet for a long time as I'm not a professional programmer
and haven't contributed code so my point of view doesn't hold much weight
but I hope to be expressing a wish that other silent readers have - if not,
I'll quietly go away and see what other solutions can do for me.
First, some background: I was first introduced to computers as a child, on
Apple ][ machines at my father's work, on which I learned to program in
basic, making little games. I then progressed to a ZX81 at home and then a
spectrum, all of which there was an easy route into programming. I then
spent around 15 years without a computer and when I finally got a PC was
horrified - I had a computer which (out of the box) I couldn't use to
compute!
I have since dirtied my hands with all sorts of programming languages and it
took a long time before I stumbled over squeak. Squeak has been an amazing
and enlightening adventure for me but I have never really used it. The thing
that has kept me interested even though I don't use squeak (except to
explore squeak itself) is Alan Kay's dynabook vision. This is how I'd like
to use my computer (or even better, my pda.)
Now in the next part of this mail I'm going to say all sorts of things that
I'm sure many squeak developers will disagree with. I'm aware that squeak is
being pulled in several directions simultaneously and everyone has their
good reasons for doing so but I have to put my viewpoint across and deal
with the flames. If any of this sounds blunt or naive, I'm sorry.
There are many RAD ways of building native applications - wxPython, wxRuby,
wxPerl... You get the idea. I'm sure wxGNUSmalltalk would be possible. For
me, the beauty and the power of squeak is in the direct manipulation of
objects.
I would love to see Tweak in the main image. There is a lot of talk about
cleaning up morphic and the huge effort it would require. Would it not be a
better idea to spend that effort getting Tweak functional in the main image?
I'm sure there are many ways that the etoys environment and tile scripting
could be expanded upon to create more advanced programming possibilities for
the non-expert like myself.
One way in which this type of environment could be useful to the layperson
(and I have many more ideas which I'll save for a later date) would be the
types of things that people generally use (and abuse) spreadsheets for.
For example, if we had a list that we could pull from a flap and then could
produce a tile that sums all the elements or have a 'collect' tile that
could be used to make a little script to add 15% to the values and populate
a new list... These morphs (or tweaks) could be embedded into a bookmorph
(booktweak?) and easily presented in an attractive manner. One could even
use the animation capabilities that etoys already has to create motivational
aids - a small drawing of an athlete who will reach the finishing line at
the other side of the screen if the numbers add up right (those numbers
could be your weight, the money you've earned, the amount of cigarettes
you've smoked..)
Anyway, I'm sure a lot of you have thought about the dynabook and about
adult etoys and fantasised about what it could do. I just worry, maybe
unjustly so that squeak is being developed by such competent programmers
that the needs or wants of people like me who aren't programmers or maybe
have it as a hobby gets overlooked. I think that adult etoys
--

James Fenn - Guitarist
www.jamesfenn.co.uk
 would be the killer app (environment or whatever you would call it) for
squeak.
Many thanks to all of you for such an amazing piece of software,
James

Hi James,

On 2/5/07, J F <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Sorry if you've received this 3 times, it never seemed to appear on the list
> the first 2 tries...

Google mail doesn't report back in case you send something to a
mailing list. Normally these things work fine. I received your posting
thrice now. ;-)

Best,

Michael

J F skrev: Hello, interesting post.
I think etoys are great and I enjoy programming with them. But you reach
some of it's limitations pretty fast and you will have to get your hands
dirty with smalltalk code ( not too bad.) There are quite a few
enhancements to etoys in the OLPC image:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_EToys

And here is a spreadsheet etoy called Skeleton:
http://www.languagegame.org:8080/ggame/11

I have not used Skeleton my self, so I can't comment on it. But it looks
very interesting.

Karl