[Edu-sig] Shuttleworth Summit

[Ian Bicking]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> There's a lot to read in your post and the links you post -- more than
> I have time ofr right now. Let me try to prune some of the ideas.
> 
> I'm not interested in switching to Jython for this purpose; nor am I
> interested in directly linking to code that's part of Squeak --
> unless, perhaps, there's some low-level code that is independent of
> the rest of the Squeak environment while providing some functionality
> we need. I'm also not interested in making Python an entirely
> self-contained system such as Squeak is -- much of Python's strengths
> come from its capabilities as a glue language, seamlessly integrating
> with other software on many different platforms.
> 
> But, after encouragement from Alan Kay, I *am* interested in producing
> a Squeak-like environment *on top* of Python. Alan suggested using a
> slightly different starting point than Squeak; modern graphics cards
> have a wealth of functionality that can be accessed directly. I'm no
> graphics expert, but I believe OpenGL and perhaps SVG could be the
> right basis to get started.

This all sounds like pygame.  Is there a reason people aren't happy with 
pygame as infrastructure?  It's quite portable, there are already 
widgets built on top of it (like Squeak, these widgets have no relation 
to the system UI -- for better and worse).  It already has a development 
community.

There's still a lot of hard work to creating a real Squeak-like 
environment there, but going any lower level than that -- especially for 
reasons like portability -- just doesn't make any sense.  If there was 
some other environment with other compelling reasons to use it (like 
maybe better vector support, or better libraries to create systems with 
text flow and whatnot), but unless someone wants something that *already 
exists* elsewhere, I can't see a reason to consider radical 
infrastructure work.

There are some basic limitations to pygame, but those limitations don't 
seem to be the reason people are speculating about other (mostly 
non-existant) systems.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org