Gary Robinson's Rants

Python in One Laptop Per Child

Here's a post from a PyCon participant:

I'm sitting in the plenary at PyCon where Ivan Krstic is giving an amazing talk about the One Laptop Per Child project.

Even though the laptops run Linux, most of the "operating system", including things like the filesystem, are written in Python. In fact, the goal is to write absolutely as much as possible of the operating system in Python. [James Tauber]

That's great. As most readers of this blog now, Goombah is written in Python. In fact Python has been may language of choice for around 10 years now, so it's nice to watch its ongoing progress.

Oh, and here's why you should write Cocoa apps in Python (or Ruby) instead if you're thinking about using Java.

Goombah 0.98.8

This is a fairly substantial release. The biggest changes are:

• Goombah now has auto-update functionality -- no more need to manually download it.
• Goombah now works properly with multiple Windows user accounts.
• It now shows the date that members added each track.
• It now uses much less CPU time when idling.

There are various other bug fixes and smaller improvements.