The OLPC is "retro-futurist"

TWO PYTHON programmers gave an entertaining talk at the CAFECONF conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They hailed its use of the Python programming language and the Sugar GUI. They call the OLPC " retro-futurist" since it allows kids to inspect and modify code, just as a ZX Specrtum did.

Alejandro David "tenuki" Weil (red shirt). Alejandro Cura aka alecu - in his "stealth" mode, trying to avoid the camera.

Alejandro Cura and Alejandro Weil were at CAFECONF representing the local Python user's group, PyAr. For those not familiar with Python suffice to say that it's a high-level programming language, in the same league as Ruby, Tcl, or Perl, and is used in the OLPC for its GUI, dubbed Sugar, and also for most of its educational programs.

OLPC machines inspected by mere mortals

The coders brought a pair of OLPC machines and introduced the audience to the hardware features, letting people examine them and the younger and older from the crowd try to open its lid. Then they commented that according to Ivan Krstić adults take between two to three minutes to figure out the non-obvious mechanism, kids with no previous experience or directions open them in less than 30 seconds.

They hailed the hardware design's key points, from its screen to the mesh network, the low power design, the robust construction etc. They also showed a running ZX-81 emulator playing the "mazogs " game. Cura says that this is the machine that introduced him to computing. He says there was something wonderful in those machines: the stop key. You could stop a running game -or any other software- and list its source code. He says a whole generation learned to program that way. I couldn't help smiling at his remark... I was one of them too, at around age 10 with a Tandy CoCo.

The GUI widgets available on "Sugar" and the Spanish language keyboard layout.

They then called the OLPC so advanced that it's going to feature a special key to do the same program stopping and code inspection that Cura's own ZX 81- actually a Brazilian clone - had over 20 years ago. "Kids will be able to see the code of the running program, and change it, see the results of the change, and pass it on over to their classmate sitting next to him or across the room". "That language is Python", he remarks, "millions of kids will have access to that language, and us as a Python user's group will do everything we can to support this project".

He made it clear that while the laptop.org has a developers' programme that sends machines to select developers working on areas of interest to the project, that it's not necessary to have one hardware unit to begin programming for it, with the availability of OS images that can be run under a virtual machine with VirtualBox, QEmu, or VMware.

Alejandro Cura during one of his speeches. This time not camera-shy.

They suggest that anyone interested in developing for the OLPC and in need of help gets in touch with the nearest Python users group. Asked by e-mail how many people are in PyAr, Cura says "I don't have an exact number, but I guess that there's about 30 very active members, with about 300 subscribers to our mailing lists".

With regards to the hardware, they told the INQUIRER that the machines were loaned to them by Educ.Ar, the government e-education body which is managed by the Ministry of Education, and that they have used the same units successfully since their first keynote in Santa Fe.

Alejandro David Weil is 29 years old Math student at the University of Buenos Aires, goes by the handle "tenuki" and works at Core Security, the company founded 11 years ago by another fellow Argentine, Lucio Torre. Alejandro J. Cura is 31, and has his own consulting company dubbed Vortech. Both are currently porting a game to the OLPC that they created in a week for the pyweek competition. µ