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Support for first-time users
The general goal here is to make Squeak more accessible to first-time users and non-programmers. There are four aspects to this work as we see it right now...
Experiments with alternative syntax
Make the language simpler or at least more approachable by a large population of users of the Internet. There are numerous possible ingredients here, including the use of fonts and indenting to indicate structure, alternatives to keywords in expressions, reserved words for control, and so on. The one ground rule for now is not to change the underlying method format, both to limit our task, and to ensure that the entire system is accessible with the alternative syntax. We are carrying out the first stage of this investigation by making changes to the pretty-printer, and then browsing the system to see how it looks. Once we decide on a format we like, we'll turn to the task of compiling it.
Make the world of Squeak and its objects more concretely accessible.
Make the process of creating a simple application simpler and more intuitively obvious. We are currently thinking of this as somewhere between Morphic Wrappers and Fabrik without wires, with a flexible component set always available from a parts bin.
A new programming framework
Allow seamless movement from the kind of scratch programming one does in a workspace to the full spectrum of Squeak development. The heart of this project will be the design of an integrated inspector/browser/debugger -- a sort of object operating table in which you have concrete control over everything about the object being examined.
Integration of the existing "Etoy" scripting tiles with these new facilities
This will also involve a reexamination of the stepping and event-handling facilities in the light of the generalized event-handling planned for the redesign of Morphic.
Status
A short list (most recent first) of entries of the form
[2/27/2000] Preliminary goals defined
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