Re: [Visualpython-users] Progress toward wxPython

[Mark A. <dre...@gm...>]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 7:23 PM, Bruce Sherwood <Bru...@nc...> wrote:
> Soon it became evident that a significant stumbling block was the fact
> that in Python, as in so many languages (but not JavaScript) 1/2 was
> 0, not 0.5. This caused lots of trouble for our physics students, so I
> proposed to the Python community that 1/2 be 0.5 instead of 0. That
> was a trigger for lots of debate among Python developers, who
> eventually found that they had their own reasons for making the
> change.

Thanks for the recollection.  The reason I said it was a significant
break, is that with that debate/faction, [my sense was] a fork between
physicists, who were looking at high-level programming languages as
both a pedagogical tool and modeling tool (beyond its historical use
as a calculating tool), and the computer science crowd, who were
looking at languages from a completely different light within both CS
theory and programming language design (in which Python was a recent
and novel contribution), occurred because of an unresolved debate
about the importance of floating point (for the Phys crowd) and
historical "prejudices" in comp science crowd about having unambiguous
"round numbers".

To me, this was a bit split, and although it was relegated to the
__future__ and is the default in python3, the "future", if you will,
still hasn't seemed to have happened yet.

> There has never been a "VPython development community".

I understand that it has been small, but I don't know if you're aware
how much silent support you guys had in the simulation and modeling
crowd.  Though they weren't participating directly in vpython
development, they were waiting in the background -- hedging for a
major language adoption, so that they could [re-]invest their
"holdings", so to speak.   Much like a bunch of financial investors
eyeing at a new country which is evaluating a choice at instituting a
democratic, free-market system.  Judging from your message, I don't
think you ever saw that, but yet I know that it was there.  I think
Guido sensed it, but in the end his computer science bias simply won.
With that win, many turned away.

> So the "VPython development community" has fluctuated between 1 and 2
> people, and this infinitesimal group never "receded from the
> python-dev community", of which it was never a part.

This is the source of my lament, Bruce -- it was on the verge of
becoming a major synthesis and collaboration between two major groups
(comp sci and physics/modeling).

> As for "VPython attracts young programmers", I've been disappointed
> that Brandmeyer was the only new person, young or old, to get deeply
> involved with VPython development after its creation.

I meant that 3-d graphics, in the easy way that vpython makes it, adds
a very cool "gee-wiz" factor that is hard to beat.  Young programmers
eat that stuff up, and it acts as a magnet that attracts more
development.

> I don't understand your pessimism, that one must abandon multiplatform
> or speed or API.

I mean that the OS carries its *own* event model and sits between
python user-space and the hardware.   It has its *own* ideas of how
I/O should be scheduled, managed, and accessed (that is the *business*
of the OS after all!).  This makes it difficult to be multi-platform
without sacrificing either raw speed or consistent API abstraction
(two ends of the hardware <--> user "stack").

> As for a unified operating environment, I'll point to GlowScript
> (glowscript.org), which is very similar to VPython but runs in a
> browser. It is based on Javascript (or optionally CoffeeScript) and
> uses in place of OpenGL (used by VPython) the similar 3D graphics
> library WebGL, which is part of current browsers. GlowScript now has
> capabilities roughly comparable to VPython. Not coincidentally, it has
> been built by David Scherer and me, though Scherer has not been able
> to work on it for some months, being deeply involved in his new
> company (foundationdb.com). It has been a great joy to work in an
> environment where thanks to being browser-based it was truly trivial
> for GlowScript to work automatically on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

I've been following your developments with glowscript and with all the
hype of HTML5 and WebGL.  I like those experiments, because I think it
keeps vpython in the public consciousness to some degree, but I really
think WebGL will go the way of VRML (remember that?); i.e. a powerful
tool that no one knows how to exploit properly.

...Which bring me to the (real) point underlying all of this.  As you
might remember, I was at the Santa Fe Complex, trying to develop a
tool to make this nascent phenomenon of "hackerspaces" work -- a tool
to link people and projects together in a visual way, solving once and
for all the scaling problem that happens when you get to about a 1000
objects.   Slashdot, digg, del.icio.us, etc. -- all have suffered from
the "paucity of dimensionality" that HTML is.

Current HTML offers about 2.3 (fractal dimensions) of representing
linked data (i.e. "hypertext").  VPython (or WebGL, in theory), could
break the web about of the 2-d box and create a 3d *Presentation*
layer for the WWW allowing the visual cortex to make relationships
between data rather than hand-crafting RDF.  I call this Internet II,
and if I could just get the event-model understood in VPython, I would
have a working demo in short order, but that has been driving me up
the wall because the paradigm between my "python self" and my "vpython
self" is currently dissociated for reasons I've been alluding to.

Anyway, you don't need to break time away from vpython development,
but I do think it would re-vamp the web out of its current suburbia
and re-ignite the creative economy.

Thanks for your time,

MarkJ
Gothenburg, Nebraska