Python evolution: Unease

[Paul Rubin]

aleaxit at yahoo.com (Alex Martelli) writes:
> Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
> > Really, I just want to buy a new
> > computer, turn it on, and have everything there.  That's generally
> > impossible without running satanware from Redmond
> 
> The princes of insufficient light from Cupertino will in fact be very
> happy to sell you such computers,

I actually do sometimes advise nontechnical people to buy those things
and run the installed software since GNU/Linux is really not there yet
with a number of types of apps, and is more of a maintenance headache.
But if I bought one myself, I'd feel oblige to reformat the hard drive
to get rid of the darkware (= no source) just like I do with a PC.
I've played with that notion at different times since the hardware is
actually rather nice.

> and _their_ definition of "everything"
> includes a bit more than the Redmonders' (e.g., Python is there, perl is
> there, gcc is there, so is Apache, a good development GUI-based IDE,

Oh cool, you mean emacs/gud/gdb.

> emacs, a solid firewall, a _usable_ Terminal/commandline program to run
> bash or tcsh on, ...),

Yes, shell mode in Emacs works fine, I haven't had much need to use
anything else.  Xterm also works.  

> though it's no doubt still missing many pieces
> that you or I might want as parts of *our* "everything" (gvim rather
> than just vim,

I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be... I remember
someone explaining "you can't spell vile without vi".

> GUI/IDEs for Python, 

I remember there was a gud interface for Python but it didn't work
pretty well.  There's also IDLE which is pretty crude and flaky.  I
think I'll just wait for Pypy deployment before worrying about this
situation too much.  Is there something else I can download?

> Python add-ons such as numarray,
> gmpy, ctypes, ...) -- all of those you still have to download and
> install, just as you would for the satanware.

That's unfortunate, that stuff should be included with Python.