Thank you Tim for all these precisions. Jannik 2014-05-21 19:43 GMT+02:00 Chris Muller <ma.chris.m@gmail.com>:
Okay, thanks for filling in the background for me.
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 12:00 PM, tim Rowledge <tim@rowledge.org> wrote:
(I donât have a subscription to the pharo list so I imagine this will bounce from there)
On 21-05-2014, at 9:47 AM, jannik laval <jannik.laval@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, we already discussed about that with Tim. Our goal is not the same.
Exactly; there are quite different needs to fill. Scratch is part of the UK (and some US) school curricula and so the basic version must be exactly as expected. People get very hot under the collar anytime I suggest even the smallest change other than making it faster.
There is certainly room for expansions *later* but it will be a difficult job to get people invested in the idea. Teachers have a hard enough time without being blind-sided by new âimprovedâ software.
I don't want to say something wrong, but Tim want to do Scratch on a recent Squeak, then including BYOB. He is working hard to integrate it on RPi.
Yup. Porting Scratch forward was a *lot* of work. Thereâs still a lot to do.
Phratch is something different: it is based on Scratch, but the goal is to be as much extendable as possible. For example, I use it for robotics. This is not possible in Scratch. Yes there is Enchanting, but it is based on a plugin if I understood well.
Enchanting is very cool and largely based on the original BYOB IIRC. There are quite a few other robot-contolling systems based on âplainâ Scratch though, especially on the Pi where we have all those nice GPIO pins to play with. Sadly a lot of them use a Python âserverâ to handle Scratch broadcasts and then talk to the GPIO or other attached hardware add-ons. Iâd like to work around that.
Another goal is to access to Smalltalk code. As a good learning language, I think that using phratch should help developers to learn smalltalk, which is not a goal of Scratch.
True, and also very foolish of MIT. I think making Smalltalk available through Scratch is a great aim.
So, as I said, we already discussed with Tim, and I am sure we will
reuse our work. If I remember, Tim already has a look at phratch source code. For my part, if Tim do plugins that work on RPi, I will probably use them.
And I hope to meet Tim at ESUG if he will come to discuss about all of that.
Iâm still planning on attending, so I look forward to talking.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with.
-- ~~Jannik Laval~~ Ãcole des Mines de Douai Enseignant-chercheur http://www.jannik-laval.eu http://www.phratch.com http://car.mines-douai.fr/