On Feb 9, 2006, at 1:38 PM, Bill Janssen wrote:
>> Python does not currently have an official Mac maintainer.
>
> Bingo! And no one has stepped up to document the amazing torrent of
> productive activity since Jack "retired". As a result, the useful
> pieces are scattered all over, the official documentation is wildly
> out of date, and there's not even a useful web page for MacPython.
>
> Add to this the fact that the pre-installed Python is widely held to
> be useless by well-respected and influential members of the community.
> A parochial and self-defeating assessment, I think.
>
From a lurkers point of view . . .
I think the starting point of the whole page is the perfect way to
begin. There are many of us who find that python 2.3 is just fine for
the kind of things that we are trying to do. Telling a newbie that
this is a great tool but you need to do an update is just going to be
overwhelming.
Case in point. The other day I volunteered some time at the local
elementary school and the computer teacher was looking for something to
give to some more advanced 10 to 12 year olds. I told him that his
Mac's all have python installed and it comes with a turtle graphics
module. "Turtle?", he says. "Does it work like the old Logo system?"
After ten minutes of showing him how to get started and answering
things like "What's this terminal window thing" he's off and running
and very excited. It cost him very little time, no money out of his
budget, no software to install on 30 machines, and suddenly he has a
whole new tool to play with and expose his kids to some simple
programming concepts. Now he's off learning python. That's how it
should work for a newbie.
Karl
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