I agree pretty much completely with Charles Harman, Bill Janssen, and others. I learned programming in 1974 and have programmed ever since for my own engineering work. I use and have used many languages, trying to pick the best one for the job. I have gripes with many of the specialized languages/environments meant for technical work, so I prefer to work in a "real" language. For many years that was Pascal, and nowadays it's mostly Ada (not intended as a slight to Python).
But I digress. Having Unix under the Mac has been a great boon in the availability of software. (I wouldn't, for example, be using free GNU Ada otherwise.) But I find myself spending far more time pissing around with the compiler/OS etc. than I used to in the old days. This is not progress. Not to ruffle feathers, but to offer a constructive criticism: The Unix culture and the Macintosh culture are at odds with one another. It is _not_ necessary to program with a good language while suffering the details of what's under the hood. As examples of this, I offer the much-missed THINK Pascal. (See the several threads on THINK Pascal on the MacPascal list.) This was the epitome of power and ease-of-use, in my opinion. I suspect (I have only played with it) that another example is REALbasic, recently Cocoa-able. Every time I bring this topic up in a Unix-y setting (SciPy recently), I get slammed. So please listen. Try to make software that can be used by people who aren't part of the "inside" crowd. This requires letting go of your ego and imagining what the world looks like from their viewpoint. Pretend you're setting up airport traffic signs for people from out of town, not the locals. Make an Installer for Dummies. Make an IDE that works in the Mac way. (Where are you, Glenn?) Make Cocoa access automatic with the installation. Make a simplified, high-level Cocoa-based GUI API. Make an easy and cohereht add-on method. Make adding SciPy and Chaco a no-brainer. (Oops--wrong list.) Never require a user to build his/her own software. Don't expand the user's lexicon with the likes of mpkg, egg, setuptools, patches, distutils, and so on. You are making end-user software. Remember that most of the people who use or would use Python don't program for a living, or don't even like to program--they do it because they have to. Hell, go get THINK Pascal and see what I'm talking about. (E.g., the entire Toolbox was predefined. The debugger was sublime.) It's free now, long ago abandoned but still used and supported by fans who are loath to run OS 9 but for it. Python with a good Mac-way IDE has so much potential to reach the same usability as THINK Pascal did in 1984. And of course, thanks to the dedicated people who make it possible for me have anything at all to on which to suggest improvements. 8^) Jerry On Feb 6, 2006, at 8:43 AM, Charles Hartman wrote: > Oh well, "other platforms" -- if that means Linux of course you > have to learn those same things, but you undoubtedly already know > them. If it means Windows, I'd rather drive a truck, and I'm > thinking particularly of potential users who feel the same way. > <snip> > Charles > > > > On Feb 6, 2006, at 10:06 AM, Kevin Walzer wrote: > >> Just to continue the conversation, what do *you* think is the best >> approach? How should Python be made easier than it already is (and, >> frankly, compared to C, it's pretty easy)? What special >> difficulties or >> obstacles does the Mac platform present to learning Python that >> are not >> also present on other platforms? > _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
