Posted by Bert Freudenberg on Jul 01, 2009; 10:11am
URL: https://forum.world.st/Usability-and-look-and-feel-was-Re-squeak-dev-The-future-of-Squeak-Pharo-was-Re-Pharo-project-ANN-Ph-tp81502p81541.html

On 01.07.2009, at 11:40, Ryan Simmons wrote:

> I some ways I agree with Ramon, that Squeak should become more aimed
> at developers.
>
> I do however feel that education is very important I was especially
> impressed by Dr. Geo II.
> I feel that EToys, Dr. Geo etc  should become applications that can be
> loaded in very much like Seaside can be loaded into a variety of
> smalltalks.

Yes, that is a nice goal. This just takes considerably more effort  
than simply ripping it out, in particular since much of Squeak was  
designed to support Etoys without drawing a strict boundary. But help  
is welcome in disentangling.

> I will probably not be too popular for saying the following, but I
> fail to see how EToys helps to teach children the use of smalltalk,
> (and hence why I am confused that so many feel that it should be part
> of Squeak) if it is there to help teach programming concepts to
> children then I would also have to say that Scratch seems to be a much
> better tool for doing this.

You are right - Scratch indeed prepares you better for using a "real  
language" later with its complete coverage of control structures. The  
scripts you build in Scratch can very easily be matched to some other  
syntax (in fact, there exists a "Python" localization that makes the  
Scratch tiles look like Python code), and reversely are immediately  
familiar to someone knowing a programming language already.

Etoys is primarily about modeling behavior rather than learning to  
program. Its target age group is elementary school children, whereas  
Scratch targets teenagers. Etoys is used to make animations, tell  
stories, create simulations, little games, do presentations etc. It's  
not for the computer science class.

But the major difference is that Etoys lets you escape to Smalltalk  
once you reach its limits. Scratch is intentionally a closed world,  
Etoys is intentionally open. You can at any time switch an Etoys  
script to its textual representation and edit the Smalltalk code,  
accessing any Squeak feature you want. Or you can create your own  
classes and incorporate them in an Etoys project. This gives you an  
environment so powerful it's second to none.

- Bert -