[Python-grants] Who was at the BoF?

[Stephen Waterbury]

A.M. Kuchling wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 03:51:48PM -0500, Michael McLay wrote:
> 
>>Should we start a wiki page to capture all of the possible packages? What 
>>should be the format for the wiki pages? Should we rank them by: 
>>maturity/quality? relevance to education? popularity? Should we add short 
>>descriptions of each application? screenshots? Reasons for suggesting the 
>>software for inclusion? What release of the software to include in the CDROM.
> 
> A Wiki page is a good idea.  I suggest we start with a small initial set of
> packages; a project with too ambitious a scope might end in the same way as
> PEP 206, which never really went anywhere.  Pick an application area or two
> and focus on them.  The math/science proposal implies that we should focus
> on education and on numeric stuff.

Focus is wise.  Math/science is a good choice both
for education (school kids) and for working engineers
and scientists, who are often not programmers but could pick
Python up very quickly if given example applications that
motivate them and docs + simple example code that helps them
learn quickly.

I also think we should be explicit about our main audience.
As you can infer from the above, I would include both students
(i.e., K-12-college) and engineers/scientists (who are, after all,
perpetual students ;).

>>	- GUI toolkit bindings
>>		- PyGtk
>>		- wxPython
>>		- PyQt
>>		- Others?
> 
> Probably we need all of them in order to support various applications. I
> don't think GUI development tools such as Glade are necessary; they're
> probably off-topic for now.

I agree GUI development tools are probably too heavy-duty.

The one exception I would make is PythonCard, which is
very simple, has a nice collection of documented, runnable
examples, and has an easy-to-use drag'n'drop editor
(as opposed to a huge IDE interface).

>>	- Databases and adapters
>>	- Web tools
> 
> Also probably off-topic, unless they're needed for an application.

- Databases -- something simple might be good, like SQLite,
                especially if we include math/science examples
                that use it

- Web tools -- I'd avoid them in this context
                -- a whole separate CD for just that
                might be a good sequel to this one ;)

>>	- Scientific plotting applications
>>	- Numeric Python extensions

Yes

>>	- Applications written in Python
> 
> Again, limit it to educational applications.

Agree!

>>	- Documentation
> 
> Docs are easy to include, so include everything that's legal to include.

Definitely.

- Steve