Walter Bender — Taking Sugar Beyond the XO Laptop 84
waderoush writes "While the One Laptop Per Child Foundation tries to reboot after drastic staff cuts, Sugar, the original open-source graphical interface for OLPC's XO Laptop, is rapidly evolving into a stand-alone learning platform that can run on any PC. Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year to start the non-profit Sugar Labs, has given a detailed interview about 'Sugar on a Stick' — the USB drive that allows any machine to boot into the Sugar environment. Bender also describes the Sugar upgrades coming in March — including better tools for file management, portfolio presentations, and Python code hacking — and talks about his hopes for expanding Sugar Labs and getting Sugar into more classrooms than OLPC can reach through its hardware."
Schoolkey (Score:2, Informative)
I think that schoolkey project also uses a sugar-like interface, and there is always edu-nix.org's education-oriented distro, which many say is better - but it just uses regular old KDE.
Re:Water Bender? (Score:1, Informative)
Bite my shiny metal ass.
There, fixed that for ya.
Re:I'd have called it (Score:2, Informative)
Wooosh [wikipedia.org]
Re:Sugar is a Squeak derivative (Score:1, Informative)
Sugar isn't derived from Squeak, although it certainly aspires to some Squeak-like qualities. You may be confusing Sugar with Etoys, a Squeak-based activity/platform that the OLPC ships on all its computers, which runs on top of Sugar. (If Sugar were Squeak-derived, Etoys wouldn't be necessary.)
Re:View Source (Score:1, Informative)
What he meant was quite clear. He meant that writing in Python doesn't automatically mean slow software, and writing in C doesn't automatically mean fast software.
As he said:
[making performant, robust software] requires work, work, and work.
He was responding to a post that claimed Python is a poor language for making performant, robust software. To which I can only say: pfui. Python is incredibly robust, and good Python programs are too. As for performance, they might be slow, and they might not; it depends on how much of the work is being done by C modules. You can do serious math in Python fast because of some C modules, for example.