[IAEP] Which Language?

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Caryl,

On 26 Sep 2009, at 05:00, Caryl Bigenho wrote:

> On Thursday, Ben wrote in the IAEP list:
>
> "My feeling is that the most important thing we can do in this area  
> is to
> make it easy to write Activities that are intrinsically cross- 
> platform.
> To borrow a phrase, one way to do this is to choose languages, and
> interpreters, that are incapable of expressing platform dependencies."
>
> So I have a question for you folks. I am in discussion with a  
> college CS prof who
> would like to teach beginning programming with XOs. He is interested  
> in trying
> several different languages, but I am interested in pointing him  
> toward the one
> that would result in the most universally usable Activities with the  
> idea that
> his students would be able to write Activities as class projects  
> that could then
> be widely distributed.
>
> It would be great if they would be, as Ben suggests, cross-platform.  
> By that, I mean
> usable on the XO-1, XO-1.5, SoaS, live CD, etc. for PCs and Intel  
> Macs. Of course my
> dream ideal is that they would also be able to be run on the old  
> PowerPC Macs that
> are still widely used in the public schools, but that is probably  
> too much too hope for.
>
> So...the question is, what should I tell him?

Python.

Regards,
--Gary

P.S. I can provide more ifs and buts, if you really want, but given  
the lengths and distractions of some recent threads, I thought I'd  
just give you the answer, straight up ;-)