Perl open source contest

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Tue Feb 1 17:29:01 UTC 2000


"Michael Chean" <Michael_Chean at email.msn.com> wrote:
> I received this message from the Bruce Eckels mail list   Is this sort of
> thing done for Small talk, or any language as long as its open source?
> 
> The Department of Energy has awarded a grant of US $860,000
> to spend over the next two years on development of
> easier-to-use software engineering tools for computational
> scientists and engineers. All of the work will be Open
> Source, in Python, and have a strong emphasis on design,
> testing, and documentation. For details, see:
> http://www.software-carpentry.com


FWIW, Python is basically Smalltalk without the GUI.  Garbage
collections, first-class class objects, and no static typing to get in
the way.  I'm not sure whether it has any anonymous function objects
akin to Smalltalk blocks.  It also has a library comparable to Perl's. 
In fact, there's no real need for Perl nowadays, except that people are
ignorant of Python.  It's a pretty good open-source programming system.


In fact, if anyone is thinking about what kind of documentation Squeak
might be able to use, looking at the python web site would be a good
idea.  They seem to really have a lot of good, well-organized stuff out
there.  www.python.org.  Just in case anyone has extra time for that
sort of thing :)



So anyway, I wonder what they do with all that grant money?  Perhaps
they're going to spend all that grant money developping a GUI :|

I wonder what cool stuff Guido van Rossum might have been able to do, if
he had had an open-source Smalltalk to work with instead of doing Python
as a new language from scratch....


Lex





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