[sugar] Programming environments on the XO

[Chris Ball]

Hi,

   > There has been talk about expanding Pippy to support a variety of
   > programming languages, perhaps as plugins; to add syntax
   > highlighting; and general interest in seeing Develop proceed.

Pippy's always had syntax highlighting, see:
   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Pippy.png

The gtksourceview2 library we're using has support for syntax
highlighting almost all programming languages, not just Python.
If someone has another educationally-appropriate programming language
in mind, I think it'd be short work to add support for it into Pippy.
Gathering tutorial code for the new language would be harder work.

   > Syntax highlighting in Write has been brought up as well.  C and
   > Javascript environments have been specifically highlighted, since C
   > is used for a fair bit of code that we ship; but enthusiasts of
   > Ruby and many other languages have considered providing an intro
   > dev environment as a standalone activity, one per language.  And
   > HTML creation is possible in Write but without highlighting, and it
   > is not obvious how to put this to good use.

I'd be happy to switch over to embedding a Write buffer into Pippy,
once it has syntax highlighting.  Another useful feature would be for
Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does.
I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on.

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>