[Edu-sig] More OLPC chatter (PataPata; Edit&Continue)

[kirby urner]

On 7/1/07, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> First, to emphasize a key idea below, everyone here should see for a six
> minute video walkthrough example;

Thanks Paul.

Given the ballyhoo around a fall release date for the XOs (not sure
what means "release date"), it's obviously too late to add edit/continue
to the current feature-frozen edition, which I hope is stable, because
that's what ministers of education are being asked to buy in bulk and
"try before you buy" is the name of the game, including in mesh
networks (so no squid?).

But I assume all this is true, because of the many pilot demos we've
been reading about and seen on TV.  First edition XOs are ready to
ship in vast quantities right now, nothing waiting on Guido doing
something to Python.

Coming from a Kusasa angle, Squeak fizzles as a draw right about
the time kids are ready for a TuxLab, either thin client or fat (like at
HPD, all Fedora and Gnome).  Dive in to the creaky adult world,
nothing like SmallTalk, and see how the poor people live, with their
primitive emacs, vi and gcc, a graphical shell IF you're lucky.  This
is Python's native habitat.  Dirt poor, dirt cheap (free -- unlike
Visualworks) yet powerful enough to drive an XO on the fly.

So it all looks promising.  South African kids in Cape Town get some
XOs late this year, early next.  We develop the eToyz, flesh out the
modeling in a Squeaky clean environment.  Then we move on to
later phases of pipeline, where the messy adult world obtrudes,
and workstations get specialized.  This one does web serving to
the outside world, that one does nothing but database.  That's
what a TuxLab is good for (simulating real world businesses), and
that's where Python shines as a glue language (SQLAlchemy,
TurboGears or whatever -- stuff the village elders might use to
organize a local co-op).

Kirby