[Edu-sig] Shuttleworth Summit

[Dethe Elza]

On 4/21/06, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> 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?)

Yes, it runs on OS X and Bob Ippolito periodically updates the port so
it keeps reasonably up-to-date (and PyGame isn't changing all that
fast these days, most of the activity is on Python-only add-ons which
"just work").

> > 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.

PyGame is a very low-level infrastructure for moving around bitmapped
graphics and primitive event capture.  It also supports a mode for
equally low-level OpenGL.  So it does support 3D, but nothing like
Squeak, which I believe supports a full scene graph with high-level
objects.

Widget tools created with PyGame share with Squeak the fact they they
don't look or behave like native widgets, and tend to be uglier than
the native widgets on any modern system.  They can be OK for a game,
which typically use custom widgets anyhow, but are grating for use in
applications--worse than Java.  The Mozilla folks used to have similar
problems, but have spent years now working on their toolkit to get
native look and feel to their widgets, with good (and still improving)
results (better than wx, better than Swing, light years better than Tk
or OpenOffice).

> 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/)
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--Dethe