[Edu-sig] FYI: PataPata postmortem link

[David Boddie]

Ian Bicking wrote:

> There's some similar issues being considered for OLPC.  Specifically the
> laptop has a "view source" key, which (unsurprisingly) lets you view the
> source of what you are doing.  What that means is application (aka
> "Activity") specific, but a general Python solution is called for.
>
> Of course it's a little hard to say what that actually should be.  Just
> a text editor?  Not too exciting.  Really there should be a view of the
> process.  And some way to manipulate the in-process objects and source.

When I hear something like this, I think of pipelines or trees of
self-contained components rather than source-level objects. Wasn't
there a talk at EuroPython 2006 about data processing that covered
this approach?

[...]

> Of course, at some point you need complete power, which means editing 
> the source in ways that can only be meaningful when you restart the 
> process from scratch.  I'm not sure how or where to make that break. 
> OTOH, emphasizing clean/fast/easy restarts might be more general and 
> easier to implement than in-process persistent editing.

In many ways, it's more interesting to consider making modified copies of
existing processes. It avoids difficult issues with in-process interaction
and encourages something like a prototype-based approach. It seems to me
that this might work well with simple components, but maybe I'm just
trying to avoid facing those difficult issues. :-/

> I'm also not sure what to build on, or what to use.  It's interesting 
> that you felt out-of-process interaction was successful.  This fits with 
> my own intuition that in-process stuff can be dangerous and fragile. 
> But I'm not that familiar with the details of how the interprocess 
> communication should happen; perhaps IDLE is a good place to start 
> looking.  Perhaps IDLE is a good place to start the development?

My experiments have led me to believe that interaction between processes
using their standard input, output and error streams is a fairly robust
foundation on which to implement out-of-process editing facilities for
use with simple editing environments.

David