ToonTalk
| Paradigm | concurrent constraint logic |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Ken Kahn |
| Developer | Ken Kahn |
| First appeared | 1995 |
| Stable release |
3.0 / {2009}
|
| Platform | Desktop is Microsoft Windows and ToonTalk Reborn is HTML5 |
| License | Versions 1.0 and 2.0 had commercial licenses from several different publishers worldwide, but version 3.0 is now free. ToonTalk Reborn is BSD 3.0 |
| Filename extensions | .tt for Desktop ToonTalk |
| Website | ToonTalk IDE and language (Animated Programs) and ToonTalk Reborn for the Web |
| Major implementations | |
| ToonTalk IDE and ToonTalk Reborn for the Web | |
| Dialects | |
| Desktop ToonTalk and ToonTalk Reborn for the Web | |
| Influenced by | |
| Janus; Actor model | |
ToonTalk is a computer programming system intended to be programmed by children. The "Toon" part stands for cartoon. The system's presentation is in the form of animated characters, including robots that can be trained by example. It is one of the few successful implementations outside academia of the concurrent constraint logic programming paradigm.
It was created by Kenneth M. Kahn in 1995, and implemented as part of the ToonTalk IDE, a software package distributed worldwide between 1996 and 2009. Since 2009, its specification is scholarly published and its implementation is freely available.
Beginning 2014 a JavaScript HTML5 version of ToonTalk called ToonTalk Reborn for the Web has been available. It runs on any modern web browser and differs from the desktop version of ToonTalk in a few ways. ToonTalk programs can run on any DOM element and various browser capabilities (audio, video, style sheets, speech input and output, and browser events) are available to ToonTalk programs. Web services such as Google Drive are integrated. ToonTalk Reborn is free and open source.
Beyond its life as a commercial product, ToonTalk evolved via significant academic use in various research projects, notably at the London Knowledge Lab and the Institute of Education - projects Playground and WebLabs, which involved research partners from Cambridge (Logotron), Portugal (Cnotinfor and the University of Lisbon), Sweden (Royal Institute of Technology), Slovakia (Comenius University), Bulgaria (Sofia University), Cyprus (University of Cyprus), and Italy (Institute for Educational Technology of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche). It was also source of academic interest in Sweden, where Mikael Kindborg proposed a static representation of ToonTalk programs and in Portugal, where Leonel Morgado studied its potential to enable computer programming by preliterate children.
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