Lambda the Ultimate

The Etoys end-user programming environment is becoming tremendously important because of its inclusion with the One Laptop Per Child XO. Etoys was invented by Alan Kay's research group and is in continuous development and use as an integrated feature of Squeak Smalltalk. The Squeak/Etoys community includes lots of researchers, programmers, teachers, and kids around the world.

Squeaky Tales is a series of short tutorial screencasts designed to each people to program with Etoys. I'm very excited that this may be what's needed to make Etoys programming easy to learn for people at home. My experience has been that it's easy and fun to teach Etoys programming face-to-face with everybody using their own laptop, but that it's very slow and frustrating to try and learn Etoys by yourself just by installing it and clicking around. If Squeaky Tales makes it easy and fun to learn Etoys all by yourself at home then it's quite a contribution to the world!

If you try learning Etoys with Squeaky Tales then do leave a comment to say how you get along!

Markus Gaelli, Oscar Nierstrasz, Serge Stinckwich. Idioms for Composing Games with Etoys. C5'06.

Creating one’s own games has been the main motivation for many people to learn programming. But the barrier to learn a general purpose programming language is very high, especially if some positive results can only be expected after having manually written more than 100 lines of code. With this paper we first motivate potential users by showing that one can create classic board- and arcade games like Lights Out, TicTacToe, or Pacman within the playful and constructivist visual learning environment EToys dragging together only a few lines of code. Then we present recurring idioms which helped to develop these games with only a few lines of code.

Learning to program with Etoys is very mind-stretching. Beyond the drag-and-drop syntax there's a world where programs are created by directly manipulating tangible objects on the screen. The objects expose a varied collection of primitives and it's a real journey of discovery to learn how to compose simple and beautiful programs. This paper documents some of the "aha!" discoveries that make Etoys programming lots of fun.