Re: The Future of Python

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Glyph <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> On Feb 6, 2014, at 1:31 PM, Guido van Rossum <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 10:31 AM, Bruce Sherwood <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> I was surprised that in talking about the future of Python Jessica didn't
>> touch on what may be really crucial, which is the importance of being able
>> to use Python in client-side browser programming. Running in a browser is
>> of rapidly increasing importance and Python could easily get left behind.
>> There exist multiple projects whose goal is to be able to compile Python to
>> JavaScript to address this issue. It looks to me like Brython may be the
>> best bet, in that it seems to be an active development with a small but
>> growing community of interested parties. What do you think about this,
>> Guido?
>>
>
> I think this is a lost cause. Many very smart people have broken their
> heads against this particular wall.
>
>
> Personally I'm keeping an eye on Brython, but it is basically
> non-functional from the perspective of running *any* existing Python
> code, even code written from scratch specifically to be portable to
> Brython. PyJS, on the other hand, while somewhat clunky, I've managed to
> get existing Python libs up and running on with a relatively modest amount
> of hackery.
>
> Nevertheless, Bruce, I would encourage you to contribute to one of these
> projects; maybe make Brython's parser a bit more of a serious contender,
> since its way of integrating with JavaScript and HTML is much more
> sensible, even if it's not really "python" in any meaningful sense yet ;-).
>  Notwithstanding most of python-dev's disinterest (including Guido!), I
> agree that this is critical to Python's long-term survival.
>

Then we're doomed, because this is entirely political (the companies making
browsers must want to do it).


> And let me make a halfhearted attempt to bring this on-topic: it would be
> absolutely *amazing* if IDLE actually had a plugin to allow you to write
> some HTML and some CSS and stuff so that new users could easily get up and
> running with something that looks "real" to modern students (i.e. a web
> page that they can share, not just some turtle graphics on a canvas).
>
> -glyph
>
>


-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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