The Future of Python
While I didn’t get to go to PyCon this year, I read Guido van Rossum’s impressions. It’s quite apparent that the use of Python in One Laptop Per Child project is going to be driving the development of Python in the following months. One paragraph on Guido’s blog that really excites me is shown below.
The software is far from finished. An early version of the GUI and window manager are available, and a few small demo applications: chat, video, two games, and a web browser, and that’s about it! The plan is to write all applications in Python (except for the web browser), and a “view source” button should show the Python source for the currently running application. In the tradition of Smalltalk (Alan Kay is on the OLPC board, and has endorsed the project’s use of Python) the user should be able to edit any part of a “live” aplication and see the effects of the change immediately in the application’s behavior. (A versioned document store will make it possible to roll back disastrous changes.) This is where Krstic wants my help: he hopes I can work magic and implement this feature for Python. I got started right away during the conference, with a reimplementation of python’s reload() function that can patch classes and functions in place. Even this small component still has a long way to go; a checkpoint of the work in progress is checked into subversion as part of the Py3k standard library. That’s not where the rest of my OLPC work will show up; they use GIT for source control, so I will get to learn that.
While I think the changes to Python in the past couple of years have been a bit esoteric (and a bit disheartening), having the ability to update live code would make me as happy as a peach orchard hog! It might even be the tipping point to get Blaine, my friendly neighborhood Smalltalk apologist, to start using Python.
