[Idle-dev] /me waves

[Douglas S. Blank]

Hello everyone!

As someone who cares deeply both about open source software and getting
more diverse groups of people into computing, I appreciate the details of
unfolding story. First, I think that we call all agree on a few points:

* all software can be made better
* open source software is put together by volunteers
* there aren't enough female voices in this community
* diversity is a good thing---it allows us to see issues from other
perspectives
* we all want a good IDE for Python

If I can jump in, I'd like to suggest that we all now work on a way forward.

1. Are IDLE sources on github? That would make it easy to fork and fix.
2. Perhaps IDLE could use a steering committee, composed of people from
all walks of life
3. Perhaps IDLE will not satisfy all these groups of users. What then?
Options? Let 1000 IDLE's bloom?
4. Is the design of IDLE correct? Or is a reboot in order?

I very much appreciate everyone's honest discussion so far, and hope that
we can work out the issues---a similar situation occurred at PyCon
(perhaps not ironically) [1], but I hope that we can work out the problems
in a constructive way here.

Thanks!

-Doug

[1] -
http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/21/breaking-adria-richards-fired-by-sendgrid-for-outting-developers-on-twitter/

-- 
Douglas S. Blank
Associate Professor, Computer Science, Bryn Mawr College
http://cs.brynmawr.edu/~dblank  (610)526-6501