[IAEP] Fwd: [sugar] Pippy VS Develop

[C. Scott Ananian]

>  On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 4:51 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
>  <mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >
>  > I'm trying to form my opinion about inclusion of Pippy and Develop in
>  > Sucrose 0.82.
>  >
>  > Here is my understanding:
>  >
>  > * Pippy is well maintained and tested but it's supposed to be just a
>  > stop gap solution. For the future we will be focusing on Develop.
>  > * Develop is not very mature and tested yet. Jameson is the only
>  > developer and he is not sure if he is going to be able to keep doing
>  > it.
>  >
>  > I'm sure I didn't get this quite right, so please step in and correct me :)

For what it's worth, I don't consider Pippy to be a "stop gap"
solution.  I consider it to be an "incremental" solution.  The idea is
to start with the easy problems and work towards the hard problems,
maintaining a functional and accessable system to write activities at
every step.  I have encouraged people interested in working on
"Develop" at various points to start with Pippy and extend it, rather
than trying to come up with something sparkley and brand new, since
many of the previous sparkley efforts have not yielded anything usable
in the end.  Perhaps Jameson's Develop will be the exception.

That said, there are probably good reasons to split Pippy at some
point so that we keep a version focused on young users first learning
about programming, similar to the splits in the Tam Tam family of
activities.  But I would prefer to see a unified Pippy grow up, so
that the "complex" stuff is hidden for beginners but accessible as you
have need.  The simple Pippy interface is for activities which fit in
a single file -- and there are more activities than you'd think which
fit this mold.  I'd love to see a mode added to allow Pippy to edit
multiple files which grows naturally from the single-file edit mode.
 --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )