[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SLOBS] Long-term support for Sugar

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Michael Stone wrote:
> Consequently, I want to make using activities more like web pages. That's why I
> work on rainbow and on networking design.
...
> In my opinion, ideally, they click a URL and the software they
> clicked runs most of the time. They don't care what version is underneath. If
> they want to change it, they hit view source and edit. If they want to share
> it, they share the URL, however they like.

Thank you for this perspective.  I think this is a very helpful way to
think about our software behavior goals, especially if we imagine our URLs
as being a bit content-addressable.

> Lastly, about the idea of shipping everything in Python, or Java, or Smalltalk: 
> 
> Give up -- this works for mobile phones, not for "things to think with"! 
> 
> Programming languages are prime examples of "things to think with". We're
> trying to provide people with lots of these, and with the best ones that we can
> find, remember?

Hmm... but surely web pages are the prime example of a medium that
contains an extremely limited variety of languages?

I have come  to accept that we should "provide people with lots of"
languages, but I think we can, and should, choose our interpreters to
retain independence of platform, and isolation from distro issues.  Even
x86 assembler can be such a language, given an appropriate interpreter [1].

For a particularly strange glimpse into the future:
http://www.codebase.es/jsgb/

[1] http://www.qemu.org/qemu-doc.html#SEC69

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/attachments/20090924/ff517436/attachment.pgp