One Laptop Per Child kicks off PyCON 2007
This year’s Python Convention [1], being held this weekend in Dallas Texas, started off with an inspiring presentation by an engineer from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project [2] (Ivan Krstić) , showing off the hardware features of the new “OLPC XO 1” prototype, as well as some “dangerous ideas” about its software design: a large part of the user space code for the laptops will be implemented in Python, mainly because of the ease of manipulating the source code. The OLPC laptop software will be 100% free software, not just in principle, but in spirit as well—the assumption of open source design is literally built into the hardware.
In his “Dangerous Ideas” presentation, Krstić lamented the “great lie of open source”: namely that it is enough simply to make the source code available for a piece of software (leaving the problem of setting up a development and build environment and learning how to use it as “an exercise for the user”). He also noted that the average user of this laptop is expected to be a 6-year-old gradeschooler. Thus, the laptop goes several steps further:
* By using Python, which eliminates the problem of compiling and linking
* By writing almost all userspace code for the laptop (including the GUI and the filesystem) in Python
* By actually building a “View Source” special function key on the keyboard, as support for the “Develop” activity (one of several activity-based interface elements on the laptop)
Also:
Today was day 1 of PyCon 2007. It started with a talk by Ivan Krstić which I
can only describe as inspiring. Ivan works for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
project and he described the focus of the project, its current state, and its
heavy reliance on Python. With the exception of a few low-level components,
the OLPC laptop is built entirely using Python. It was inspiring to hear the
desire of this group to provide such a tool and an opportunity to those who
would otherwise have missed out. It was also inspiring to hear Ivan speak of
overcoming “impossible” barrier after barrier. I would recommend anyone who is
able and willing to support this project with their time and talent to visit
the OLPC website and look for a spot to
fill.
The next session I attended was “Writing your Own Python Types in C” by Jack
Diederich. This was a good overview of porting Python code to C code and using
Python’s C API to do so.
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