Pippy and Calculate

[Jameson "Chema" Quinn]

I agree. This would provide a good use case for Pippy, something directly
useful which would get kids involved. It would be great if some simple
programming like::

  for x in range(0,5,.1):
     y = x ^^ 2
     plot(x,y)

... would work without needing 'import plotter', then it would be a graphing
calculator too. Of course, as soon as you ran the above plot, you'd need to
follow up with::

 plotter.auto_rescale()

(That is, the invisible "from plotter import *" would include::
  Class Plotter
      ...
      def plot(self,x,y):
          self.show()
          ...
      ...
  plotter = Plotter() #Make a default plotter
  plot = plotter.plot #Make a shortcut so that a beginner can type plot
instead of plotter.plot
)

... As to the volunteer-power, I agree that it needs help, but that's a
separate issue.

The one place Calculator is clearly better than Pippy is as a nice simple
Sugar example app, we can let it be nothing but that (not in the default
build, but available and easily installable if anyone wants it).

my-two-cents-worth-ly y'rs,
Jameson

On 9/4/07, Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at squeakland.org> wrote:
>
>   Hello,
>
>   Now, we have Pippy.  Into Pippy, the user can type simple
> expressions with some mathematical functions there and execute the
> expression.  This means that there is large overlap between it and
> Calculate.  Since Calculate is overly under-developed and it has very
> complicated interface, we can now think that we have an option to
> remove it from the build without causing too much grief.
>
>   Imagine if Pippy has a button called "Print!", which would be
> located right next to the "Run!"  button.  And, if "Print!" prints out
> the results of running the program into the bottom pane, that is
> pretty much all we need.  (For the record, the workspace in Etoys has
> been there from day one for this purpose.)
>
>   Some small input assistance may be a plus but having the software
> keyboard for numbers is not a good idea anyway.
>
>   We have a real problem of shortage of man-power, so replacing
> smaller activities that take more time to maintain and document with
> more powerful ones is probably a good thing.
>
>   What do you think?
>
> -- Yoshiki
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