[Idle-dev] The Future of Python

[Guido van Rossum]

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.


> I'll mention that with the aid of Steve Spicklemire VPython has been
> converted to be based on wxPython, which was vital in order to get off
> Carbon and onto Cocoa on the Mac, and which also makes it possible to use
> wxPython widgets with VPython 3D canvases. I'm happy to report that in the
> last six months there were nearly 50,000 downloads of VPython, and that
> it's now featured in four (soon to be five) computational physics textbooks.
>

That's awesome!


> Inspired by VPython, with a big initial push from David Scherer, the
> originator of VPython, I'm developing GlowScript (glowscript.org) where
> you can write VPython-like 3D animations using WebGL, writing in JavaScript
> or CoffeeScript. A minimal program is the single-line program
>
> box()
>
> This program places a WebGL canvas in the window, displays a cube in the
> window, creates lights to illuminate the scene, places the camera so that
> the cube fills the window, and enables mouse interactions to zoom and
> rotate. You can of course control all of these elements, but there are lots
> of good defaults to get going easily. Needless to say writing WebGL
> programs with other tools is vastly more difficult.
>
> It's already the case that it's very nice to be able to send a URL in an
> email and have the recipient click that link to see a 3D animation rather
> than asking them to install Python and VPython. Here's a simple example
> that will run in WebGL-enabled browsers:
>
>
> http://www.glowscript.org/#/user/GlowScriptDemos/folder/Examples/program/Bounce-CoffeeScript
>
> Many more demo programs are available at glowscript.org.
>
> However: I don't like the syntax of JavaScript, especially for novice
> programmers, and even though CoffeeScript is more Pythonesque its syntax
> and use of white space is kind of quirky and, I judge, not good for
> novices. I would love to enable Python as one of the languages (indeed the
> major language) for novices and experts to write GlowScript programs.
>

Agreed that CoffeeScript is not newbie-friendly. But browsers have been
even more unfriendly to running Python than mobile platforms. At least for
the latter we have Kivy.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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