[Edu-sig] Hello, I'm Tim...

[Kirby Urner]

Hi Tim --

> >
> That slideshow thing is awesome. It's done in Java, I assume?
> 

Yeah, I presume so.  A free service I'll probably use again -- and you may
upgrade to more bells and whistles, if you pay them, which I'll consider
also.

> I think someone did visit as a result of the site, as the visitors went
> up from around 20 this month (very few) to 53 (still very few, but more!).
> 

If you keep that dyndns URL alive, I think you'll find that our simply
burying a pointer here on edu-sig will feed traffic over the long haul.  

What's true about archived listservs (a brand turned generic, like xerox for
copy) is your communications are far less ephemeral than on IM or chat (chat
logging is the prerogative of any individual, but there's rarely a highly
centralized archive unless maybe on some .gov or .mil accounts).

> --
> Visit my website: (and please be a supporter of free trade, free
> software, phr33 s0ftware, free dom, and free propoganda by giving
> others the url) http://kmg.is-a-geek.org
> Garunteed to be down at least 5% of the time.
> 

I should introduce you to some of the characters on board edu-sig.

Arthur here is younger than I'd expected when I first met him via this list.
As sometimes happens, you meet a person over the Internet long before you
meet them in person, and it's funny when you've built up these expectations
based on reading, and then, wow:  (a) this person is just what I imagined!
or (b) how could I have been more wrong? -- and anywhere in between.

Anyway, Arthur was still in the NYC financial district (near the old Pan Am
skyscraper) when I met him; we had a beer.  Pygeo is his pet Python project,
which has a lot of sophisticated geometry *on top* of the code, i.e. you can
get lost in projective geometry as a topic in itself, and never even stop to
consider that people (Arthur in a chief capacity) had to code this thing.

John Zelle, recently chatting on the same thread, about wx, VPython, IDLE,
Tk and so on, is the author of a new computer science text book, published
by a friend of mine in Wilsonville.  I recently attended a seminar at
Willamette University in Salem, geared for college professors looking for a
good intro-to-CS language, post burnout on C++, and then Java.  In general,
the so-called agile languages are getting a second look these days -- Perl
definitely, but also Ruby and some others.  John's book was given out free
to everyone in the room -- smart marketing, but in my view an ethical
maneuver, as if these profs in turn require students to purchase a copy,
that spreads comprehension of Python, a powerful tool, a friend of geeks
everywhere and for all time.

Given the first computer language I ever learned was APL (Princeton had APL
terminals scattered around the campus, netted to the IBM 370, just to see
what would happen), you'll see that I've been an agile languages buff from
the beginning, though I've dabbled in systems languages, starting with
Assembler, FORTRAN, then PL/1, some C/C++ -- but that's not my forte.  No, I
gravitated to dBase because of all my work in the NGO sphere (the 501-c-3s),
and grew up at the "dot prompt."  Even today I'm a highly skilled FoxPro
programmer.  VFP opted out of .NET because it already had a lot of the same
features, and an even cooler philosophy in some ways -- but more about that
some other time (and on some other list).

John, by the way, comes from a Java-teaching background.  This connects us
to Jython, a recent topic in our mentor-student emails.  My own appreciation
for Java as a language (if not a bread and butter one) derives mostly from
Bruce Eckel ( http://www.mindview.net/ ) -- ditto C++.

Anyway, these are only some of the wonderful cast on edu-sig.  We have the
special distinction of being one of the first listservs to be the subject of
a PhD thesis:  'Promoting Computer Literacy Through Programming Python' by
John Miller.  You'll find the link on our home page: 
http://www.python.org/sigs/edu-sig/

Kirby