ChapterZero

A while ago, I heard about spammers using MT blog’s comment engines to propagate their message. I didn’t think I’d be a victim, but it turns out I was too hopeful. I just deleted two comments that were obviously spam. I hope I don’t have to do so again. On the good side, the spammers caused the site to rebuild itself, voiding the front page, thereby forcing me to make a post.

This weekend I’m very busy, among other things, trying to complete a special problem assignment for my Antennas course. The options available for this assignment were nearly all programming assignments, with a bias toward crossplatform GUI building. This caused me to research Python, because I had somehow gotten the impression that Python had strong crossplatform GUI support. I found out to my chagrin that it doesn’t: it ties into Tk, which although it has a new updated, almost native feel to it under WinXP, still turns me off, and also to a wxWindow based package called wxPython. The appearance of wxPython is fine, but who can write a program that requires both the presence of Python and two other auxiliary packages (wxWindow, wxPython) and consider it to be crossplatform? That requires too much effort on the part of the casual user, almost voiding the usefulness of the platform independence thereby gained.

Then I discovered Jython by a happy accident, and saw how it can solve my problems by tieing in seamlessly with any Java library, including Swing. And I do mean seamlessly. I ordered a book on Jython, “Jython Essentials”, through the UH library, and received it yesterday. Of course, that is too late to do me any good– I doubt I could learn a language in the time I have available, considering the other things I have to do– but I’ll keep on hand, so in the future, I’ll be able to blow my prof out of the water with a professional GUI.

On the personal side, this morning it hit me that Jython also provides a nice alternative to implementing a CAS in scheme, because it would render the problem of graphical tools a nonissue– all the Java toolkits would be readily available. Plus the CAS would be nicely crossplatform, and easily distributable. What I would like to see is a Scheme implementation in Jython (I believe that if one existed for Python, it should work under Jython also); then maybe the hypothetical CAS wouldn’t have to sacrifice the elegance of implementation that comes from being written in Scheme, and still have easy access to Java toolkits. It’s worth a thought; although, one would have to deal with the issue of how to expose an interface to Java/Jython capabilities to the Scheme interpreter without resorting to ugly, bloated or counter-intuitive hacks.

Of course, since Jython hooks in so well with Java based toolkits, the currently available Scheme implementation in Java ( I forget its name), might be just the thing I’m looking for. All of this is worth pondering…

All I’m sure is, Jython is the coolest idea I’ve come across in a long time.