On 9/30/06, kirby urner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > if it could be taught more like a computer science. That's what I'm > already up to, plus having the most active Bucky site on the net (BFI > didn't exist, no Bob Gray's site -- Chris Fearnley with his FAQ was > one of the first). Only then do I come across Python. >
BFI didn't yet exist as a hosted domain on the W3 I should say. Kiyoshi and his Philly friends got the bfi.org moniker secured (John Ferry catching from inside the BFI, then in LA), while I webmastered the first primitive website (still retrievable via archive.org -- note they've so-far kept with the tabs format, plus built something agreeably interactive (the web is less about push, more about pull these days, which I like -- more people publishing their own content, not just passively browsing (of course one wants both active and passive modes)). You'll find me in an old FoxPro Advisor, yakking up Chakovians Coordinates (calling 'em Quadrays), long before I'd stumbled across Python. I'm trying to think how Microsoft could make VFP affordable to schools, for the kind of math-through-programming exercises I'm thinking kids'd love (no, not every kid, and no shame in preferring football). But VFP is already a twisted story by then, having been appropriated by MSFT as a "dBase killer" (Borland went with Ashton-Tate's branding), touting Xbase as one of the Pillars they'd be supporting (right up there with VB and C/C++ I think it was). Obviously BS in retrospect. XBase is not general purpose like VB and not low level like C/C++. It was an early agile, interactive from the beginning, and when upgraded to an OO, was actually more sophisticated than VB -- we *defined* our own classes in a Visual Studio like IDE, didn't just use blackbox DLL objects supplied to us by COM or whatever (though we could use those too, and still do). VFP has always been better than average, by Microsoft's own standards (no shame in having an "average" that you're sometimes "better than" -- I was not saying this to be disparaging of MSFT). Anyway, yes, Chakovian Coordinates, centered at (0,0,0,0). Tom Ace chimed in with some 4x4 rotation matrices and wow, we had like this whole little vector algebra thing going on Synergetics-L. Someday, we'd capitalize on that even further. The Gerald de Jong entered my life, all hyped about Java. He flew out to JavaOne. The guy was already a Canada-trained mathematician and C/C++ guru. It's not like he was just cutting teeth. He had this vision of something called Elastic Interval Geometry and counted both Kenneth Snelson and Bucky Fuller as inspirational in that regard. Following Gerald's lead, I saw the wisdom in using a free language, especially one that'd work over the web, so dove into Java pretty seriously. I forget exactly how that connected me to Python, but it did. Linux was hardly usable as a GUI desktop yet, so all this is in Windows, dating back to early DOS, and in my case, yes, even CP/M on a Zorba. My trajectory from FoxPro through Java to Python is well chronicled in a multipart Geometry through Programming paper I published to 4dsolutions.net. I'm always focused on the same Polyhedra, using Chakovians or whatever, but I keep doing it over in a different language. Towards the end, the Scheme Team was generously coaching me on how I might continue my arc (these were the early edu-sig days, plus I was already posting to that same Math Forum forum), and implement the core ideas yet again in that language. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. However, for all my digging into PLT Scheme, I think by this time I was too mired in other paradigms. Lambda Calculus was never my focus, even at Princeton, where a lot of the original work was done (as I learned only later). Here's that multi-part geometry paper (VFP -> Java -> Python arc i.e. not really the Shuttleworth pipeline, especially when you count the early APL and the ongoing J branch, plus I've dabbled in Perl, C and Pascal, plus did FORTRAN for money (the only way I would)): http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/oop.html Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
