Lambda the Ultimate

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.