Status of Develop.activity?

[Albert Cahalan]

Charles Durrett writes:
> On Dec 5, 2007 6:37 PM, Jameson Chema Quinn <jquinn at cs.oberlin.edu> wrote:

>> Starting January 6, I plan to be working 20 hours a week on Develop.
>> Actually I was gonna do tinymail first as Sugar practice.

If "tinymail" is an email client, I'd like to discuss it with you.

>> I estimate that I will have something useable (for Develop) within
>> a month, though "usable" is very very far from feature-complete.
>> No source control, language features, activity sharing, or even a
>> real debugger in the initial version, just a python editor and shell.
...
> I feel a Develop.activity capability is a very important aspect of the
> OLPC.   Along the lines of the embedded basic interpreters in the early
> computers mass marketed to the general (and creative) population.   It's
> also philosophically important but that's a whole different discussion.

I disagree, despite a strong belief that programming should be
easily available to kids. There are several types of environment:

a. VB-style RAD. (place widgets with mouse, write bits of code)
b. tokenizing editor that refuses to allow bad syntax
c. traditional editor

It looks like Develop is a traditional editor, and maybe not
a very nice one. (it's abusing a full word processing engine)
I would not be surprised to find that the Terminal activity
is a much more usable solution. There you even get your choice
of editor, language, build system, revision control, etc.

It seems we already have a Python IDE anyway. Why have two?
(you can answer "this will replace Pippy" of course)

The old 8-bit computer BASIC editors often would simply refuse to
let you enter bad syntax. The language was also quite easy. Sorry to
all the LISP fans out there, but "220 GOTO 200" is really easy for kids
to understand. The XO is sorely lacking in something so easy to use.
The other stuff (Python, Smalltalk, Java, etc.) is really hard
compared to BASIC. Well, if one were trying to discourage kids, then
the modern stuff would be perfect for that.

I have to admit that VB development is very easy to start with.
Things would be really different if kids could "draw" an activity,
click on objects to add bits of BASIC, and then click to spit out
a *.xo that is fully functional.

Finally we have the problem of NO systems programming language
being supplied. It's less than 9 MB for the whole C development
environment, including a decent collection of *-devel packages.
You even get a second language thrown in for free, x86 assembly.
Pretty much everything that matters is written in C, including
the Python interpreter.

> I've gotten IDLE working on the OLPC and plan to look at slamming it
> together with the presumably Sugar architected fragments from the
> Develop.activity files I found dated March of this year (2007).   As I
> mentioned, I'll be eating my own dog food by using only what's on the
> deployed machines and whatever I can create that way.

This I like to hear. Eating one's own dog food is very good.

Note that non-activity developers need to put aside some RAM
for the activities. (sugar developers, I'm looking at you!)
Booting with "mem=128m" ought to do the job. In less than a
year, the system memory usage has more than doubled. I hear
that people are actually doing development on workstations
with lots of RAM and fast CPUs, and it shows.

Actually doing the OS builds on the XO would be wonderful.
This would have caught the problems with *-devel RPMs being
broken.