[Edu-sig] Just some stuff

[Arthur]

I had mentioned...
> 
> If I'm going to control povray rendering from the PyGeo interface

Sadly, I'm ready to abandon this effort, or at least the effort at making it
crossplatform, or at least the hope of getting Windows to act predictably.
Its hard not to blame Windows both as an operating system and as closed
source software which lets us know what it wants us to know and no more. I
seem to get different behaviors at different runs of the same code.  Or else
small modifications of codes are having strangely unpredictable impacts. Or
else it might depend on what else I happen to have open at the time, and
what resources it happens to be consuming. 

The real point is that there doesn't seem to be anywhere to turn to
understand what is happening, and I consider myself pretty good at
researching this kind of thing. 

If one were working with the Python Windows extensions, and thereby within
the framework of the officially exposed Windows API, I suspect things would
be otherwise. I am gathering that the subprocess.py module is an attempt to
do so and then abstract things back to crossplatform functionality.  But I'm
not sure its there yet.

Not totally OT, IMO.  John Zelle expresses some deep concerns in connection
with the instability of Idle and the impact of that on his efforts, and
presumably others like it.  True Idle is trying to do much more complex
things at the thread, socket, subprocess level than anything I am attempting
- but the folks working at it have orders of magnitude more expertise, and
still have trouble achieving crossplatform stability.  And crossplatform
stability seems to me to mean here getting Windows to work reliably without
so many contortions as to confuse other platforms - where I think the
solutions would otherwise be straightforward.

Jim Huginin, now of Microsoft,  will be talking at PyCon on his IronPython
project to bring Python to .Net - which will be interesting. With .Net, the
burden of achieving crossplatform functionality will shift to the Open
Source folks, through Mono and the like.  And will probably be better
realized, as a result.  

It is hard not to think of .Net as Microsoft in some sense abandoning there
own operating system.  Which may be an expression of integrity of its own
kind.  

Art