[Edu-sig] RE: intell adoption problem

[Michael McLay]

On Sunday 04 January 2004 01:30 pm, Kirby Urner wrote:
> Do you invest in DAML technology?
> http://www.daml.org/
> Your lingo seems partially overlapping.
>
> A science fiction scenario wherein your technology has been implemented and
> is on the job, doing its thing, might be useful, in terms of getting across
> what you want to accomplish, and using more outside-the-beltway layman
> terms.
>
> Is it Google on steroids, with the ability to retrieve web pages based on
> natural language heuristics?  At least Google is a business model that
> people already understand (sort of), and Python is used.
>
> I'm not sure why your angle on Python needs to focus on "Python 3" i.e. are
> there some specific features missing from 2.3 that you'd need to get your
> work done?

Getting education related proposals funded appears to be much easier than 
getting pure CS language development funded. (The largest block of grants are 
education related grants, so this isn't too suprising.) The Python 3 
reference is included because the funding request is piggybacking the Python 
3.0 development costs on the larger education centric proposal. The 
improvements to the language would presumably benefit the education process 
that uses Python 3.0, so adding the cost of the language improvements onto 
the project is legimate. It provides a concrete example of how the language 
improvements are a justifiable investment to a grant giving organization. 

> The "new features" thread is not front and center on this list I think it's
> safe to say, although we've recently had a thread on getting a new decimal
> type included (Guido has announced in other venues that this is already a
> goal).

Decimal numbers are very important. Many other Python 3.0 features have also 
been discussed on the python-dev mailing list. The list needs to be 
developed. I made a first stab at this about a year ago, but that list is far 
from complete. Someone on python-dev was going to start a list of Python 3.0 
features (I think it might have been Brett.)