Long timers here might remember Arthur Siegel's PyGeo, still on Sourceforge
<https://pygeo.sourceforge.net>. He and I used to endlessly debate, here on
this edu-sig listserv, the relative advantages of this or that pythonic
pedagogy, but were in agreement that VPython <https://vpython.org>, or
Visual Python, was in the toolkit.
We managed to meet up in New York City, then I had to abort a second meetup
at a Pycon and yada yada... I only met him in person that one time. No Zoom
yet.
Where is VPython today and who is using it?
The physics teaching subculture is where it comes from and where it still
thrives from what I can tell. I managed to get invited to an AAPT meetup
<https://worldgame.blogspot.com/2010/07/physics-conference.html> (American
Association of Physics Teachers) by Dr. Bob Fuller, then its president, and
to sit in on some VPython talks.
However, short of full scale animation, ala Blender
<https://www.blender.org> today, we have the ray-tracer as a genre, and the
ability to render stills. What brought me to Python in the first place, on a
pilgrimage <http://4dsolutions.net/ocn/oopalgebra.html> through several
languages (starting with FoxPro), was my appetite for computer graphics,
geometric in particular. Today I'm on several Facebook groups that feed
that appetite. Sometimes I roll my own.
If you're new to Python and/or maybe looking for something more off the
beaten path, not data science, not AI, then I recommend the free and open
source stack I'm continuing to toy with: Python + povray, the latter coming
from a CompuServ heritage, with an open source license predating anything
GNU GPL.
The animated GIFs <https://groups.io/g/synergeo/message/2735> I'm making
also make use of Fiji <https://fiji.sc>, another free open wrapper. I write
and run Python scripts
<https://github.com/4dsolutions/School_of_Tomorrow/blob/master/flextegrity.py>
to generate Scene Description Language for POV-Ray <https://www.povray.org>,
render say 7 - 9 frames, then sequence them into a single GIF file
<https://groups.io/g/synergeo/message/2739>, where Fiji lets you control
both framerate and whether to keep looping or not.
My contention has always been: it's a two way street i.e. we're not only
learning Python in order to master more math; we're learning math to write
more interesting Python. The math I've been learning, around polyhedrons,
has given me hours of coding enjoyment and a deeper understanding of
spatial geometry.
Kirby
