Hi David I can see why someone might think that it's rather off-topic for Edward to start talking about climate change in this forum. But once you get the Aha about the Leo project, it might seem less bizarre. Contrary to initial appearances, I don't think that the main purpose of Leo is to provide a better text editor or a better programming tool. Leo's main contribution is as a metaproject about how to make certain kind of problems which were previously rather difficult to think about more tractable.
It took me a while to realise this. Probably it wasn't till I read the History of Leo (http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/history.html) that it dawned on me. If you have a look at this, you'll notice that Leo started off as an attempt to put into practice Donald Knuth's ideas of literate programming. However, in working out how to do this, it became apparent that we can do this more clearly and perspicuously than Knuth himself had seen by deploying the idea of the program as an outline. Since then Leo has progressed in a way that is rather unusual way for a software project: the recent focus on simplifying the underlying data model and the move to the "graph world" were motivated not so much by an attempt to build new features into Leo, as to try to work out what are the very simplest and most perspicuous ways of representing the structure of nodes in Leo. Similarly, the latest work on Pylint takes this metaprogramming approach much further, and is thus highly relevant to the underlying journey of Leo. So in my view, Leo is (and hopefully will always remain), a deeper and more philosophically interesting project that a standard text editor or IDE. So I'm personally happy for Edward to go off on a tangent from time to time -- because the Leo project is not just about how to produce a robust and well-featured python editor, but, more fundamentally how to improve the tools by which we think about the real world. Perhaps a good compromise would be if Edward marked his occasional OT posts as OT in the title, so that anyone who only wants to know about coding matters could simply ignore. James -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor?hl=en.
