[Python-Dev] Google Wave as a developer communication tool

[Ben Finney]

Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:

> Ben Finney wrote:
> > I watched [the Google Wave presentation] too. It appears to be
> > heavily reliant on *very* fast internet access for participants in a
> > wave. That's far from universal in the Python community, let alone
> > the internet at large.
> 
> Even a slow connection would make participation in PEPs better than
> today.

How can you know that? A slow link doesn't punish email or NNTP
communication the way an interactive web application does. Why would
Google Wave be any less punitive to low-bandwidth users than existing
live web applications?

I would not want to put money against Google technologists giving lower
priority to the needs of the majority of internet users without fast
connections.

> > It also appears to be heavily reliant on the wave's existence at a
> > single point of failure (the hosting server): if that one point
> > becomes unreliable, all participants are hosed.
> 
> We have that problem already with the tracker, which does occasionally
> go down for a bit. And the svn host? (One reason to move to
> distributed system.)

Right. These are all reasons for moving toward distributed systems;
Python has chosen to do so already with its VCS. Why would the choice of
a new communications technology not take this into consideration?

> > Neither of these problems exist with email (or NNTP).
> 
> But do for an email list, like this one.  Or a wiki.

No. None of mailing list, NNTP, or wiki are heavily punitive to
low-bandwidth links.

-- 
 \     “Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as |
  `\            society is free to use the results.” —Richard Stallman |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney