[Edu-sig] Refocusing on Capabilities (was PySqueak)

[kirby urner]

Hi Paul --

I think just apply the basic courtesies of scholarship and make it
easy for readers to trace to your sources (provided your sources wish
to be known -- I respect the journalist's right to interpose cover,
though some over use this as a license to be their own anonymous
source (it's often easy to tell as poor writing is poor writing).

Your edit/recombine job may be interesting, but many browsers just
want to get back to the same stashes you savor.  Adequate signage.
Unless you're actively keeping secrets, which you may do too, though
if at the expense of an unacknowledged starving artist in Hoboken or
such like, you're playing with karmic fire.

I have many rants against the priority-focused intellectual property
discourse of the west.  The whole of western civilization rests on
sources further east, and now comes around the globe through North
America trying to lecture Chinese on what's the matter with copying --
threatening the Chinese with proprietary gunpowders, how ironic.

Actually, I'm thinking the USA is already turning away from its broken
patent system and embracing the logic of open source, despite all the
demonization of same in the economist press.  For example Portland, my
home town, is safe haven to a new breed of entrepreneurial open source
capitalists for example.  We have many working business models and
plans to expand.

Working with Chinese on open source projects is far more productive
than trying to accelerate them through a course in US business law,
which is super-confusing even to its local practitioners.  Nobody has
time for all the fine print.  It'll just drive ya crazy.  So obviously
the computer world (which operates quickly) has already found plenty
of workarounds.

About your prototyping experiments:  I'm interested in learning more
about Self and would gladly attend lectures on same, at OSCON or
wherever.  Then I could better follow your logic.  My layman's
question, after reading your posts, is:  why not just keep Python
pythonic and Self selfish?

In other words, Python already has a very strong paradigm, very simple
to learn.  Why mess with that?  I guess I'm a purist in that regard.
But that doesn't make me a language bigot, as I fully respect the
right of other languages to define themselves around equally strong,
yet different, paradigms.  I'm also biased towards OO.

That doesn't mean I think the lambda calculus people can't hack their
own brands.  They already do, and quite successfully by the look of
things.

Kirby