[Its.an.education.project] Another set of thoughts

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

> Have anybody thought about porting Sugar to Squeak? Then it could
> all run in a single runtime, turtles all the way down.

  We of course toy around the idea to have a total educational
environment on top of Squeak.  One of the ideas is to write a X window
manager in Squeak.  In this way, the third party applications can run.

  Since it has good multimedia support like audio, camera, analog
input, etc., the user can mix and connect them freely.  The Squeak
image can be made a few MB large and small individual apps can be
written in such an image.  Or, the current 15MB version contains
everything.  As you may notice, starting Etoys takes 3 seconds or such
on XO and which is somewhat slow to my standard, but once it starts
running, opening a new widget in it is very fast, and the overhead for
such a widget is very small, (tens or hundreds of kilobytes).  The raw
speed is faster than Python so many simple things would go faster.

  The current project saving mechanism is so slow on XO (bummer), but
there is a better way.  The running Squeak image can be saved into a
single file in a few seconds.  The Sugar's idea of "always running
activities" is a perfect match to the image based system (because it
essentially is).

  At the same time, Squeak had enough milage.  The technology is old,
the current tile scripting system is too limited and there is a way
too strong boundary between different languages (like tiles and
Smalltalk) in the system, and the modularity is non-existent (that is
why project saving is slow).  When Bert said that 'the entire world is
wrong in how it writes software' is what he thinks, that includes us,
too [*].  We are trying to reinvent wheels in a good sense.  If that
goes well, that system would be more suitable for that kind of
endevor.

-- Yoshiki

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[*] see http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm
  the research proposal: http://vpri.org/pdf/NSF_prop_RN-2006-002.pdf
  and first-year report: http://vpri.org/pdf/steps_TR-2007-008.pdf
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