[Edu-sig] More followup after Chicago Pycon

[kirby urner]

Hey, great seeing Jonah archiving here some!  Way to go guy.
Been studying your websites ever since Pycon, saw the footnote
to Art of Memory by F.A. Yates, likewise highly important in the
syllabus I go off.  Excellent readings.

Just wanted to share some more I learned thanks to Pycon,
before I forget:

So you know there're IronScheme (successor to IronLisp)
and IronRuby yes?

These plus this community's agile (on whatever VMs) has a
bright future on open standard shared platforms, where you
reap the benefits of synergy between languages i.e. Scheme
really is much better for some things, as in Ruby in others.

As a respectful alien, I see Ruby Planet as more like another
Perl Republic, but then JavaScript is sporting list comprehensions
and yield-based generator syntax these days (something else
I learned at Pycon), so like the computer language DNA goes
every which way doesn't it (like let's hear it for Icon).  That's
what open source is all about:  sharing the wealth (I suppose
what Commonwealth is supposed to mean, but I'm not from
the UK so don't claim to be an authority).

So I got one of those dreaded emails from a publisher wanting
to discuss book prospects right at the conference, but sending
it to my "at the office and not on the road address" so I wake
up to read it eleven hours later by car (marathon road blitz --
why are those sections of I-net all *toll roads* in the eastern
US?  Our freeways out west are still free as in beer).

I've missed some recent Pycons, plus OLPC was not a big
topic at that Shuttleworth summit (about exactly a year back,
remembering London Knowledge Lab was looking pretty
empty because of bank holiday aka easter **).  So this was
a great opportunity to "catch the vibe" as they say, feel the
excitement around the XOs (yes I have one, as my blog
readers might know, write about it in connection with Unicode
mostly (I have an interest in some exotic character sets)).
That's not to say all is perfect in that picture, which seems
chaordic in the extreme. ^^

Anyway, back in Portland, whew!

Kirby

PS:  just saw about Arthur C. Clarke, great positive futurist
dreamer, an inspiration, man of courage.

** http://www.bfi.org/bfi_community/pythonic_mathematics_talk_by_kirby_urner

^^ http://www.chaordic.org/