[IAEP] [Edu-sig] ACM Urges Obama to Include CS as Core Component ofScience, Math Education

kirby urner kirby.urner at gmail.com
Mon Dec 29 19:17:22 EST 2008


>
> The idea of a Richard Stallings type geek using the XO as his "main
> laptop" just fills me with evil glee, I'm sorry, such an absurd image.
>

Sorry, Stallman, duh.

Johnny Stallings is a talented actor who plays all parts of King Lear
and Hamlet (though not both plays at once).  More on my blogs e.g.
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2004/10/king-lear-play-review.html

Stallman (Richard) was through Sri Lanka awhile back, talking with
user groups, which is what got me tracking the Unicode picture
vis-a-vis Tamil and Sinhalese, two of the main ones.

I have a longstanding interest in fonts, taking a Tibetan glyph set
into Bhutan on Mac disks in the 1980s, only to learn from their
resident artists that Dzongkha isn't really Tibetan, lots of
differences to notice.  I understood completely, never lost my
interest in the global challenge however, of getting computer
technology more inclusive in this way.

I'm sort of collecting Python source code examples (Py3K) using these
multiple glyph sets, to get across the internationalization of the
coding experience.  I think too many get scared away from computer
science thinking it'll all be all Latin-1 all the time, whereas those
were the bad old days (still pays to learn it though, not trying to
"put it behind me" or anything).

For those of you not on edu-sig, I'm referring to the leap from 2.x to
3.x, wherein top level names became any Unicode string, facilitating
coding outside Latin-1, though Pythons keywords and special names
remain in the picture, plus Standard Library has its stipulations and
so on.

This collection would look good on an XO, but we're not trying to tie
LCDs and XOs together too tightly, as many a flatscreen is a read-only
device, like a billboard, where it makes just as much sense to show
off these new capabilities.

Kirby


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