[sugar] SAGE on XO?

[elw at stderr.org]

> Speaking of this, does anybody know if R is expected to be ported/ 
> portable to the XO?  (Or does Sage have comparable functionality?) 
> Clearly a bit much for younger students, but I'm curious about the 
> possibility of having statistical analysis packages available for 
> learners to examine various kinds of data sets.


I offered to work on it last spring, but Jim (Gettys) strongly preferred 
having energy dumped into other things that more directly serve the 
broader development of the laptop.  ;)  I think he was right - the rest of 
the ecosystem needs quite a lot of attention from developers first. 
Jazzing the numerical/analysis bits is a fairly late-term optimization, or 
at least it ought to be.

I don't think an R port / activity will be very difficult to assemble. 
I'm used to building R in weird environments, and it is relatively 
amenable to being stuffed into chroots and the like.

One of the key nits will probably be the act of hacking together Sugar 
code to 'trap' the R plot window.  Currently I suspect that using XEmbed 
to swallow the floating plot windows (perhaps into tabs...) will be the 
easiest way forward.  The R Cairo graphics device is pretty damn 
excellent, to be honest.

Ggobi would be another excellent target for sugarization... I don't think 
it does too much in the way of multi-window stuff, so sugarizing it should 
not be especially tricky.

NumPy or SciPy, with some sort of minimal support structure, could be 
awfully handy too.  :-)

A Geode-optimized haxx0ring-up of libs like fftw or ATLAS or BLAS might be 
useful, too.


full of ideas, today,

--elijah