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'll mention that with the aid of Steve Spicklemire VPython has been converted to be based on wxPython, which was vital in order to get off Carbon and onto Cocoa on the Mac, and which also makes it possible to use wxPython widgets with VPython 3D canvases. I'm happy to report that in the last six months there were nearly 50,000 downloads of VPython, and that it's now featured in four (soon to be five) computational physics textbooks. Inspired by VPython, with a big initial push from David Scherer, the originator of VPython, I'm developing GlowScript (glowscript.org) where you can write VPython-like 3D animations using WebGL, writing in JavaScript or CoffeeScript. A minimal program is the single-line program box() This program places a WebGL canvas in the window, displays a cube in the window, creates lights to illuminate the scene, places the camera so that the cube fills the window, and enables mouse interactions to zoom and rotate. You can of course control all of these elements, but there are lots of good defaults to get going easily. Needless to say writing WebGL programs with other tools is vastly more difficult. It's already the case that it's very nice to be able to send a URL in an email and have the recipient click that link to see a 3D animation rather than asking them to install Python and VPython. Here's a simple example that will run in WebGL-enabled browsers: http://www.glowscript.org/#/user/GlowScriptDemos/folder/Examples/program/Bounce-CoffeeScript Many more demo programs are available at glowscript.org. However: I don't like the syntax of JavaScript, especially for novice programmers, and even though CoffeeScript is more Pythonesque its syntax and use of white space is kind of quirky and, I judge, not good for novices. I would love to enable Python as one of the languages (indeed the major language) for novices and experts to write GlowScript programs.
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