Project dream

[Andrew Dalke]

Will Stuyvesant:
> Suppose you have the time and the money to start a new project in
> Python.  What would you like to do?

An integrated chemical/bioinformatics development and
exploration environment.  Got a few million dollars to fund me?
(Actually, more like 10 million, but bootstrappable with only
a few million.)

   :)

> - A civilization like game in Python, with multiplayer support via
> twisted.

There's been a few civ clones -- I recall playing one in the
mid-90s for Python using CLIPS for the AI.  Don't recall the
name now.  There's also openciv (in Python, nearly complete,
no longer active) or freeciv (in C, active).  What would the
advantage be to writing yet another clone?

> - An easy to use tool for drawing diagrams, typically various kinds of
> arrows and circles and boxes, that produces nice .eps and .svg files.

What about Sketch?
  http://sketch.sourceforge.net/

> - A roguelike in Python.  Since there is still no portable curses, it
> needs WConio or something like that, and also multiplayer would be
> great.

Why does that need to be rewritten in Python?  As I understand
it, the C version is very portable and may simply need just bindings
for Python.

> - Something for weblogging and todo things, probably via CGI.

Aren't there a few dozen of those already?  Falls into the category
of easy to write but without one clear way to do it.  So there are
a lot of different implementations, all different, all focused on solving
the given author's needs.

> What would your favorite be?

More important, what would *your* favorite be.  It looks like
you want to do a project but don't know which one to focus on.
My answer then is to do any of these projects; they are all great
ones to learn how to do larger, more useful projects.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com