Translated Alice (unicode version)

Well, I geus I could install it on my xp cpu then copy the directory.

[meirs]

Go ahead, there should be no problem installing Mama by just copying the root installation folder.

Originally Posted by King Gamer(gorit)

Well, I geus I could install it on my xp cpu then copy the directory.

Try install it on an other partition than C:

Lars

I only have 2 partitions. My second partition is recovery files so I dn't edit that one.

A pity. I run Windows 7 and on my computer I got the same message as you when I tried to install on C:. When I installed on D: everything went fine. That has also happened with some other applications.

If you open disk management under control panel > Computer management, may be you have some unallocated space where you can create one more partition.

Lars

Thanks, I have never known how to make partitions.

[litomd]

Meirs,
I am surprised that no one has asked here about a version of Mama in Spanish. So I am formally asking: do you have plans to translate Mama to Spanish?
I also have other questions to ask. What do you mean by a translation into any language? Does it mean that all characters’ names are translated along with their standard methods, properties and functions? All the documentation? The tutorials? Menus? User interface messages and texts? The standard instructions? If-then-else, DoTogether, DoInOrder, Loop, etc.
I would love to have tutorials and documentation in Spanish but I am not sure about the user interface and definitely would not like to have objects’ names, methods and functions, and the instructions in Spanish.
There is no technical or theoretical obstacle to translate the full language instructions into any language but for decades in Latin America we have been programming with languages that have instructions in English, and we are very used to it. I remember very few cases where the instructions were actually written in Spanish.
Nevertheless for every respectable language there is full documentation in Spanish along with language references, tutorials, and learning materials, and they are very usable.
For Alice I think anyone wishing to learn the language has to learn and understand actually very few words in English, so even for those that have never received instruction on the English language it is quite easy to start programming and understanding what is the logic behind the instructions and method names.
I often find myself mixing English and Spanish in my programs (not only in Alice) for variable names, method names, etc., whatever fits best in each case and it works well.
The point is that I don’t see a strong need to translate the instructions, object names, method names, etc. into Spanish. Even the user interface can remain in English. What we really need is tutorials, documentation, teaching material, exercises, homeworks, etc. in Spanish.
All that material should not be so difficult to translate, I mean, there is no need to recompile to source code to produce a language reference in Spanish provided that you are not translating the instructions, just the explanations for each one. I remember seeing a tutorial XML file in your site that was supposed to allow teachers to build new tutorials. Having that XML file as a resource for the code, it should not be necessary to recompile, just replace the XML file and the tutorial would be there.
I don’t know if that is the case for the rest of languages but for Spanish I feel it is.
Finally if you plan to start working in a translation into Spanish keep in mind that there are differences between the Spanish that people speak in Spain and in Europe and that that we speak in Latin America, we understand each other quite well but we know when someone is speaking the way Europeans do.
I have some comments to your work but I will post them in a new reply.
And congratulations for a great product!
Great Job!
Leonel

[litomd]

Meirs,
I think I am going to try Mama. According to all the comments I have read I may be missing something big if I don’t.
I have been an Alice enthusiast for some years now. I have promoted its use in schools here in Guatemala, and I have even taught short curses to teachers on how to use it in class. I have also noticed its shortcomings so when I read about your version I couldn’t but think that finally someone has taken Alice to the next level.
Anyway, I don’t think it is a product that can be widely promoted in schools as a learning tool or better be adopted by a government body (like our education ministry here in Guatemala) as part of a strategy for promoting computer science among students.
The reason is because it is not free as Alice is. I have seen other tools with the same handicap. There is Dark Basic for example. Not too expensive, with a long trial period suitable for a semester long course, easy to use and attractive for students, but not open and not free. It doesn’t matter that its price is not high. The question is how readily available will it be for students that are not sure they want to use it and explore it. If you are not a person that has decided that the animation industry is what they want to do for a living then even those $10 are a high price, because it is not the price of a software, it is the price to see if animation is fun or worthy.
For those students that try Alice and find it interesting and want to make a living out of animation, Mama could be a natural next step, something like a “Pro” version of Alice.
Animation studios may want it to train new hires but Alice could do that too as well as some other free and open programs.
Mama seems to have all those nice features of modern IDEs like intellisense, debbuging tools, and others. I have been a programming teacher and sometimes I just don’t like those features. They are very useful for the professional programmer, but for the beginners the teacher may prefer the raw nature of a simple text editor that forces the student to be careful with syntax, variable definitions, indentation and to invent ways of finding bugs, at least for some time, just to make sure the student understands that programming is not magic and that it is not made by computers but by humans that have to think.
These two points – the not-open, not-free nature of Mama, and its advanced features – make it less suitable for wide use in schools.
Well, these are my first impressions after finding Mama and reading about it.

[meirs]

Hey Leonel,

First, thanks for the detailed feedback!

Translation status: We have just completed the Chinese translation (see http://zh.eytam.com), and we are in process of Spanish translation. We hope to complete it very soon. I'm aware of the differences between Spain's and LATAM's Spanish, but we're not going to make two versions - we're making a unified Spanish version.

About the translation: Answer is yes, everything is translated - all GUI(menus, dialogs, commands), variable/function names, all standard names and reserved words, all world fields, all gallery objects, tutorials, documentation - everything (see Chinese or Hebrew versions as examples). (Unicode support was added for that, and world/object storage model changed completely).

Regarding mother tongue vs. English: Interestingly this issue keeps coming up in many discussions I have with CS teachers. There's a document explaining the considerations in designing educational programming languages, and, more specifically, why it was decided to have all programming language components in the student's mother tongue. In short, the main purpose of Mama, just like Alice's, is to lower the barrier[1] towards learning computer programming.
I don't know what age are your students, but think of 9 to 13 year old kid who is a non English speaker - that doubles the difficulty (and worse than Spanish, think of Chinese, Hebrew and Arabic which use different character sets and/or RTL read & write direction).

About Mama's price: I released the first version of Mama in 2005, as a simplified programming language for teaching young students computer science. I charged for it nothing, and made it publicly available. It's syntax is quite similar to Python's (I liked very much the indention based structuring), but much more simple, real object oriented with own OO event model and with built in GUI library. In the last year I've worked hard on integrating Mama language with an improved Alice2.2 version, because of it's awesome 3D and drag&drop programming environment. Since I am not paid by anyone for this work, I had to set Mama's price for the minimum of 10 US$. Though, the original Mama's typing based IDE is till available for free, with many helpful tools included.
Also note, that while Alice is free, it's documentation is not: books are somewhere between 30 and 60 USD. Mama's documentation is all free.


[1] Lowering the barriers to programming: A taxonomy of programming environments and languages for novice programmers, Kelleher, C. and Pausch, R., ACM Comput. Surv. 37, 2 (2005)

[litomd]

Thanks for your quick answer.

I will start trying Mama ASAP. I will also post my comments.

There is a lot of interesting projects around Alice now, and your is one of them. One of the others is Alice 3.0, but there is more. I hope we hear from them soon.

Regards,