[Microbit-Python] Current state of play - a summary and straw man

[Nicholas H.Tollervey]

Hi Folks,

For the sake of clarity I want to list all the different things I
remember people are working on so we have some sort of a grasp of what's
going on, where there's a chance for crossover between such things and a
sense of the whole offering. This is helpful to me since I need to
communicate with the BBC what we're doing - they're starting to get
interested in us and want to film things such as how to use the Python
editor and want to provide training for teachers.

Off the top of my head we have...

* Music API - first draft of Matthew's native API is merged into master.
Requires further development to allow it to work in the background. I'll
be adding musical examples over the course of this week and testing it
from a musician's perspective.

* Larry's game related work - I think this is hugely important. Kids
love games and showing off their work to each other. If we can make it
super easy to facilitate such hacking then we're doing something
marvellous. I'd also add that Daniel Pope's work on PyGame Zero is
something should be aware of
(https://pygame-zero.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) since this is how many
kids will start writing games on the RPi. Facilitating smooth
progression from micro:bit -> other Python is simply a good thing to do.
While this may not be reflected in the different API's I believe we
could conceptually show some progression (if that makes sense).

* Marks' image related work - again, this is hugely important because
being able to see the result of your code is a great inspiration to
kids. The easier and more capable we make this the better it'll be for
all concerned.

* Damien's suggestion of inline assembler which sounds like it'd be a
wonderful thing for the hacker/maker audience the BBC are also hoping to
tempt as a secondary market.

* David's MIDI related suggestions. I'm not clear what would be involved
for this - I presume we could use USB/serial to send MIDI information to
a MIDI device running elsewhere. David, it'd be helpful to learn how you
see this working.

* Damien and I discussed turning the display into some sort of generic
graphical equaliser for arbitrary data.

Please reply and correct me. If there's something I've missed then give
me a kick. My intention is to write the results up and publish them
somewhere obvious (such as the wiki). I hope to manoeuvre the BBC by the
end of this week so we're able to open-source the work we're doing (and
thus engage with the wider Python community). I think it important that
we frame our intentions, projects and desired outcomes before others
turn up.

As always, comments, constructive critique and idea most welcome!

Best wishes,

Nicholas.

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