[Idle-dev] The Future of Python

[Glyph]

On Feb 6, 2014, at 1:31 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 10:31 AM, Bruce Sherwood <Bruce_Sherwood at ncsu.edu> wrote:
> I was surprised that in talking about the future of Python Jessica didn't touch on what may be really crucial, which is the importance of being able to use Python in client-side browser programming. Running in a browser is of rapidly increasing importance and Python could easily get left behind. There exist multiple projects whose goal is to be able to compile Python to JavaScript to address this issue. It looks to me like Brython may be the best bet, in that it seems to be an active development with a small but growing community of interested parties. What do you think about this, Guido?
> 
> I think this is a lost cause. Many very smart people have broken their heads against this particular wall.

Personally I'm keeping an eye on Brython, but it is basically non-functional from the perspective of running any existing Python code, even code written from scratch specifically to be portable to Brython. PyJS, on the other hand, while somewhat clunky, I've managed to get existing Python libs up and running on with a relatively modest amount of hackery.

Nevertheless, Bruce, I would encourage you to contribute to one of these projects; maybe make Brython's parser a bit more of a serious contender, since its way of integrating with JavaScript and HTML is much more sensible, even if it's not really "python" in any meaningful sense yet ;-).  Notwithstanding most of python-dev's disinterest (including Guido!), I agree that this is critical to Python's long-term survival.

And let me make a halfhearted attempt to bring this on-topic: it would be absolutely amazing if IDLE actually had a plugin to allow you to write some HTML and some CSS and stuff so that new users could easily get up and running with something that looks "real" to modern students (i.e. a web page that they can share, not just some turtle graphics on a canvas).

-glyph

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