[IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 6:45 AM, Lucian Branescu
<lucian.branescu at gmail.com>wrote:

> Realistically, neither Qt or Gtk will work reasonably well on android in
> the (near) future. And realistically, Gtk 3 will never work well in HTML 5,
> since it's a desktop api.
>
> If you develop for Android, all you can do is write apps to the API
> provided. Also, the apps must be very small, because most devices have
> severe internal memory limitations. Shipping Gtk/Qt would be ridiculous, and
> it's likely that Qt will never really take of on Android (which is sad).
>
> Python also won't run on Android in the near-future, at least not for
> writing full applications. ASE is extremely limited and only really useful
> for small scripts. Also, the CPython interpreter is HUGE when it comes to
> Android.
>
> Jython is very JVM-specific, and Android doesn't have JVM. It simply has a
> VM that happens to map well to Java. Either large parts of Jython would have
> to be rewritten or PyPy would have to grow a dalvik backend, and both are
> very ambitious undertakings.
>
> And even if Python did work on Android, Sugar activities will never run
> there. Sugar won't work well on Android devices because Sugar is an entire
> environment with its own particular HIG, which is highly incompatible with
> Android's.
>

You seem very certain about the impossibility of a great many things.

Android devices will grow; what is true today will not be true tomorrow; and
tablet-class machines are very different from phone-class machines.  Moore's
law is certain to make you look very foolish on many of your claims about
memory/storage limitations.

> What could be done is to create a set of educational apps for Android. And
> that's all well and good, but it has little to do with Sugar.
>

What could be done is to create robust *portable* libraries underneath
activities, such that they can be run with little modification across a much
greater variety of platforms.  I think that has a lot to do with Sugar.
  --scott

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