[Edu-sig] Shuttleworth Summit

[Guido van Rossum]

On 4/21/06, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
> 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.

Good idea. I never managed to successfully install pygame, so I kind
of question the "quite portable" assertion. But maybe it's better now.
(Does it run on OSX at all?)

> 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.

How is pygame's 3D support? While Squeak's UI has a very flat 2D look,
some Squeak apps are effectively 3D virtual worlds.

All the pygame apps I've seen demoed (e.g. Armin Rigo's PyPy slides
and demos) were entirely 2D. But maybe there's 3D rendering with
camera positions, shading, lighting etc. too? (If not, adding it might
be a SoC project?)

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)