[Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy

[Anish Mangal]

>>      I can think of no other operating system
>>      which so directly brought his interest from theory to reality.

>>  +1: I can think of no other operating system and application which so
>>      directly exposes us to the possibility and desirability of making small
>>      changes.

I agree (as well)

>> Anyone have thoughts on what "stepping stones" Sugar and Pippy ought
>> to provide to make this act of reflection and sharing feel as natural
>> as the act of starting Pippy or of making the change that we want to
>> describe and to share?

>> Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our
>> desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well,
>> this story.

Ok, I'm a little confused here. There are two perspectives to this.
One perspective is experienced developers hacking pippy/python
examples and submitting suggestions/improvements and the other is
concerning people (primarily students) learning python; experimenting,
learning and sharing. Am I correct in assuming that we're discussing
the latter here?

> For merging the improvements as part of the Infinite_monkey_theorem, we
> would need to bring the change back from the user into the development
> community, and provide feedback to the user.  We might not be able to
> depend on an e-mail path.  So I envisage a small web application on
> sugarlabs.org that would provide these features:
>
> 1.  submission of example improvements, which are inserted into a branch
> in a git repository, where the branch is named for the user,
>
> 2.  status view of their submission branch, using a journal entry of a
> Browse bookmark,
>
> 3.  download of other submission branches by users,
>
> 4.  scoring and voting by other users.
>

Excellent suggestion. I'd go one step further and suggest developing a
simple interface within Pippy that can communicate with the web
server/application and implement the features listed above.

--
Anish Mangal


On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 1:37 PM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 03:39:46AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
>> After playing for some time -- perhaps 10 rounds -- we discovered that
>> we had lost track of which ball was currently contested.
>
> Yes, I discovered that also in my testing of the example.
>
>> We sat down to fix the problem. Since no example was available for how
>> to set the color of an already constructed ball, I had to go "behind
>> the scenes" by grepping the Pippy source code. Then I was able to work
>> out exactly what to do by several small experiments with dir() and
>> with "raise".
>
> You discovered what I had discovered ... the example depends heavily on
> the Physics library bundled with Pippy.  I got lost looking at the
> problem and gave up.  But I did almost manage to convert the code to be
> screen resolution independent.  See 4a50004 ... the winning round
> position check code has a FIXME attached, and I welcome input.
>
>>    -1: I think there's an important missing "stepping stone" here --
>>    I'm not convinced that most people would have been able to figure
>>    out how to set the ball color from the currently available
>>    view-source interface and Pippy training materials.
>
> I agree.
>
>> Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed
>> that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@
>> along with, well, this story.
>>
>>    -1: Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to do this with Sugar and
>>        Pippy today.
>>
>> Anyone have thoughts on what "stepping stones" Sugar and Pippy ought
>> to provide to make this act of reflection and sharing feel as natural
>> as the act of starting Pippy or of making the change that we want to
>> describe and to share?
>
> Quandry: we'd want subsequent users of the examples to be challenged by
> the same problem, so why would we want to fix it for everybody?  When
> editing the examples recently I saw several improvements that I could
> make but decided not to make them because I wanted the reader of the
> example to make the same mistake as part of their learning.
>
> Sharing in class context ... does this work?  Can the journal entry be
> passed around?
>
> For merging the improvements as part of the Infinite_monkey_theorem, we
> would need to bring the change back from the user into the development
> community, and provide feedback to the user.  We might not be able to
> depend on an e-mail path.  So I envisage a small web application on
> sugarlabs.org that would provide these features:
>
> 1.  submission of example improvements, which are inserted into a branch
> in a git repository, where the branch is named for the user,
>
> 2.  status view of their submission branch, using a journal entry of a
> Browse bookmark,
>
> 3.  download of other submission branches by users,
>
> 4.  scoring and voting by other users.
>
> Is there a web application that does this kind of thing already?
>
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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