data ecosystem

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 10:34 am, Man with No Name wrote:

> So....
> 
> I've an idea to make use of python's unique environment (>>>) to form a
> peer-to-peer object-sharing ecosystem.

Sounds perfectly awful.

By the way, Python's interactive interpreter (>>>) is hardly unique. Just off
the top of my head, I can think of Lua, Julia, Clojure, Ruby, Haskell, Erlang,
Rhino (Javascript), Scala, Boo, F# and PHP which all have either a standard
interactive interpreter, or if not standard, at least a well-known one.

Pretty much any programming language *could* have an interactive interpreter, if
somebody spent the effort to build one.


> Just pie-in-the-sky brainstorming...
> 
> When a programmer (or object-user) starts up the python environment, the
> environment can check for an internet connection and if present connect to a
> central "name service" to provide a list of trusted peers which will form a
> back-end, networked, data-object ecosystem.

The day that my Python interpreter automatically connects to a peer-to-peer
network of other people, "trusted" or not, to download code, will be the day I
stop using the Python interpreter.


[...]
> Python would be breaking new ground, I think (.NET comes perhaps the closest)
> for living up to the dream of OOP of a true re-useable object and programmer
> ecosystem.

The thing about re-useable software components is that it turns out that most of
them aren't that re-useable.


> I quite like the idea that vigil (see github) 

What is vigil, and what does it have to do with github?


> offered for two keywords that 
> would offer a very nice contract environment for trusting other objects which 
> I think will be essential for standardizing objects across the ecosystem.

What makes you think that "standardizing objects across the ecosystem" is
something that should be done? Such a programming monoculture would be a
terrible mistake.



-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.