[Edu-sig] Thoughts and observations...

[kirby urner]

<< >>

> Please feel free to make more suggestions for improvements.  And if you
> disagree with some of my more subjective statements on the edu-sig page,
> please do not hesitate to tell me.  And I won't be offended at all if you
> point out some grammatical mistakes and the like - my kids do it all the
> time when I speak or write in English.
>
> Cheers,
>
> André

Yes, I was thinking of this when writing about English teachers
teaching DOM, the XML framework for storing all the web page elements,
for JQuery modification based on anchoring tags or whatever, very
JavaScript, very not going away.

Same deal with other languages besides English, at least those in the
Unicode base (my friend Gene Fowler calls it Amerish over here, with
the stress on the 'mer', sounds kinda Tolkien, i.e. whether this is
really English might be questionable to some, but I quibble).

I do wonder about our policies for linking to obviously educational
applications of Python that might excite readers, with the small
problem that the sites in question are entirely in Chinese or some
other language, hey, Swedish for that matter i.e. do we have any
reason to make the links especially friendly to only-English speakers?

That's just a question, am not winding up to give you a long winded
reply any time soon I don't think.  Because it's not my page anymore
(cackle cackle, rubbing hands, Mr. Burns noises **).

Anyway, let me say again I'm very pleased with our smooth transition
to a next web wrangler for edu-sig.

When I was first webmaster for BFI.org long ago, my whole shtick was
how we need this to be a rotating position, give lots of talents
opportunities to showcase their skills.  But that was in the early
days of all static hand-coded HTML.  It's easier to share commit
privileges when it's all running inside a DVSS I would imagine, and
I'm looking forward to what creative strategies Andre comes up with,
to take advantage of hg.

Here's what I think will likely happen:  vast education sites will
arise, bursting with open source offerings, a lot of them Python,
ballooning with lesson plans, with Python.org seemingly dwarfed
because so tiny in comparison.  And that's perfectly OK, because the
challenge is to be an intelligent front end switchboard, like a stack
of Django or App Engine regular expressions, dispatching to these
giant universes of educational interest.

Python.org doesn't ever have to bloat into something huge if it
doesn't want to, even if Python grows in popularity for quite some
time to come.  The main focus of Python.org is simply to focus the
community and make core versions available, in a reliable, safe and
pleasant manner.  Something along those lines.

A prediction, let's see what really happens.

Kirby

** http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=mr+burns