Future of the Python Linux Distribution

[Martijn Faassen]

Andrew M. Kuchling <akuchlin at mems-exchange.org> wrote:
> Glyph Lefkowitz writes:
[snip]
>>2) is OCaML-Python free?

> I'm not sure what the licence is, but vaguely recall it's the same as
> Python's.  Could be wrong...

I think you're wrong. It's something like "here's the source but it's 
copyright John Skaller as Jon Skaller wants to find a way to make 
enough money to eat". At least last I checked.
[snip]
>>4) Why don't we hear more about this? What is all this jpython hype
>>about? ;-)

> It's not very widely advertised, perhaps because it's still an alpha.
> Some of the extensions seem difficult to implement in CPython or
> JPython, but it's quite possible that Vyper could go on to become the
> first languages that derives from Python.

Those languages will probably be interesting. I've been toying with some
language ideas for a while now (since before I discovered Python). Then
I discovered Python and it was so much like that language (but a lot
better) in some respects that I stopped thinking about it for a while.
Now I'm thinking about it again occasionally. I've learned a lot from
Python's pragmaticism, focus on readable syntax (just enough sugar to
make it read nicely, but not more), and flexibility traded off for
speed. I was concentrating way too much on the 'this needs to be 
optimizable to heck' aspect of language design, and I now realize that's
not so important. Maybe in a couple of years I'll start implementing
it seriously; maybe not. 

I bet there are more people in this newsgroup toying
with such ideas; in fact it'd be a prerequisite almost to be interested
in this, as otherwise it'd be hard to discover Python (at least pre-1998 or
so). I know for a fact Tim Peters wants to design a language that has
'foo' and 'bar' as hidden reserve words. :)

Off-on-a-tangent-on-top-of-a-tangent-ly yours,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?