:DELETE:BEGIN B.3 Potential impact Describe the strategic impact of the proposed project, for example in reinforcing competitiveness or on solving societal problems. Describe the innovation-related activities. Describe the exploitation and/or dissemination plans which are foreseen to ensure use of the project results. Describe the added-value in carrying out the work at a European level. Indicate what account is taken of other national or international research activities. (Recommended length ­ three pages) :DELETE:END Potential impact =================== This project has direct relevance to European competitiveness. Europe is the acknowledged world leader in handheld, mobile, and embedded devices. But people working in such industries have long desired a high level language with a very small footprint. They wish to use only the language features which they need. But modern languages are chock full of features designed for the developer to use when developing software. The new innovative concept of Object Spaces, pioneered by PyPy makes the construction of tiny Object Spaces, suitable for running on the smallest devices straight-forward. A Python with greater speed will seamlessly improve the offerings of those European Companies who develop using Python. These two reasons make the Python Business Forum quite excited about PyPy. Moreover, a great many companies, in deciding what language to develop in, reject Very High Level Languages, despite their known advantages for programmer productivity, code-reuse and maintainability because the code produced simply does not run fast enough. If we give them a *fast* VHLL, they will switch. Furthermore, one of the greatest threats to European competitiveness is its dependence upon proprietary closed source software, mostly made in the United States. This is not only the matter of money being spent in the United States is money that is not being spent here, although that affects matters as well. There are two more serious risks. The first is a threat in the present. Any company which writes its software in a proprietary, closed source language is dependent upon its software provider. If you have a bug, you must wait for them to fix it. If this bug is not a high priority for them, you can wait a long time. If you have access to the source you always have the option of fixing it yourself, or hiring somebody else to do that. But this is not the greatest of your worries. You are at constant risk of having your software provider discontinue support for your language. This is a real threat, not a theoretical one. In 2002, Microsoft announced that it would no longer be supporting Visual Basic 6.0 after the year 2005. All Visual Basic Developers have been told to convert their code to run under Microsoft's new .NET framework. Before that, in 2001 Microsoft immediately stopped supporting its Visual J++ language, meant to be a direct competitor with Java, after settling a lawsuit with Sun Microsystems. No migration path was specified. Microsoft is making these decisions because they make business sense for Microsoft, regardless of the effects on European software developers. The second threat closed source makes to European competitiveness is more insidious, and more long term. A good workman knows his tools. This is much more than the theoretical knowledge of how his tools ought to work, according to principles learned in school. The way car mechanics know how cars work is distinctly different from what you would know if you had attended classes on 'the principles of the internal combustion engine', let alone what you need to know to just drive the thing. Right now, in Europe, we don't have enough of the software equivalents of car-mechanics. And most of them live in academia, where they know the intimate details of languages that never get used in industrial applications. The world needs Formula-One race car mechanics, indeed, but it has a much greater need for people who know how to repair the family car. It is not as if there is a shortage of people who would be interested in learning such things, if the source were made available. Many people have taken this step by learning how CPython does its stuff. But still there is a barrier. If you want to know how CPython does things, you need to learn C. C is a notoriously difficult language to learn. But let me quote from an article posted to the Python-in-Education mailing list. FIXME -- I promised Arthur I would fix any typos:: Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 11:52:05 -0400 From: Arthur To: edu-sig@python.org Subject: [Edu-sig] re : If the PyPy Project ... List-Id: Python in education Terry - >Since I presume the goal of PyPy is to implement *Python* in Python, >wouldn't the implementation language be rather insignificant to an >end-user such as an educator? Why would it be "better" than CPython? For whatever reason, the complex built_in and the cmath module, implemented in Python, are part of the early pypy codebase. As I had been spending some time in the complex realm with PyGeo - a simple version of the complex realm, as these things go - Laura's post gave me the impetus to try to plugin the pypy implementations. Only got stuck on the typing issue. My code tests for instance(object,complex). The pypy complexobject, unadorned, is a class - and fails the test. But that leads me into a deeper look at some of the pypy codebase, trying to understand a little bit of how this kind of issue are to be dealt with. Not that I got there, yet - but I did seem to have an avenue to explore I would not have with CPython - as someone who doesn't C, and has no intention of trying, seriously, to do so. As someone living within the limits of having Python as my only real language, I think that pypy should open things up for me considerably. It will make Python, I believe, a more attractive educational language, because it will make someone with a strong foundation in Python - as the language of choice - a more self-sufficient programmer. Presumably - the point is - there will be less cases where the right approach would be an extension module in C or C++, and a sense of fundamental compromise should one not be equipped to go there. Many thousands of folks - using VB and the like - already do involved, highly performing real world applications and make nice livings doing so, without being equipped to do C. I am thinking that pypy would put Python more squarely in that "space". Is any of this so, or just hope? Art _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig ------------------------------------------------------ Here is somebody who is hoping we can give him a language he can understand. Python already is an excellent teaching language. PyPy will be a better one. This project has to be done at the European or the International level. That's where we all live. Since education is a primary goal of the project, we will take every opportunity to disseminate PyPy. The source will always be freely available from our website. We will continue to give talks about PyPy at EuroPython, Python-UK, OSCON (the International Open Source Conference) the International Python Conference, and others. ADD SOME GOOD ONES THAT ARE FOR CSC ACADEMICS How about OOPSLA (Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications), ECOOP (European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming), the MIT Lightweight Languages Workshops and the like as the next target? ASK STOCKHOLM -- will the EU pay for us to go to conferences? even ones we were going to attend anyway? These talks will create interest as well as teach techniques. We will submit a PEP and push to get PyPy made the reference implementation of the Python programming language(*). We will continue to discuss PyPy on our own mailing lists, as well as other Python mailing lists such as the Python-in-Education list, and the Usenet Newsgroup comp.lang.python. We already have an IRC channel, #pypy on irc.freenode.net where live online discussions happen, and where we communicate with each other while we are apart. Beyond that -- we are willing to take any actions the EU would like to fund. :: FIXME (*) emphasis on this one? If this really happens we'll arguably become the software European Project with the largest distribution and user base ever (XXX rephrase :-) Also mention that the issue (and the word 'PEP') is discussed later in B3.1_standards.txt? Ask Stockholm We think you get no money for this in a STREP. True? ASK STOCKHOLM -- can we get some money to give Freenode? re: 'Indicate what account is taken of other national or international research activities.' -- Samuele and Armin read the literature all the time. What do I say?