[Idle-dev] The Future of Python

[Sean Felipe Wolfe]

IDLE!!!!!

We are starting up a partnership with a community center here in
Oakland, CA, starting kids up with programmming. We're starting with
Logo (yay, Logo!) and transitioning to Python with the turtle module.
We've been using IDLE on Linux and also a Raspberry Pi. So far, so
good!

I for one am ecstatic about IDLE. It has a warm place in my heart. I
should set aside a few hours a week to help out with it.

Anyhow great video, thanks for the link!

On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> 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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