We had Design class from Petr van Blokland at the Academy today. I consider his lessons the most interesting, as he not only knows a lot about his profession (design), but especially much in the direction I've been looking at myself forever, which is the relation of design to more exact disciplines (information technology, physics, ai, etc.).
This sensation grew as he announced by email last night that—on proposal of Casper—he'd start a Python course for those interested. The original plan for today was to merely evaluate who those people are, but on popular demand, the course started today.
He explained—briefly—what the syntax of this object oriented language looks like, using DrawBot and a beamer to visualize his words on the spot. He also showed some interesting examples of DrawBot renders.
I've been meaning to learn this language for years, but never really got to it (even when I started reading Dive Into Python). What I've been shown today got me more excited about it than ever, and this looks like a great opportunity to pick it up, as we're planning on actually doing something usefull with it.
The greatest moment of inspiration and anticipation for me personally came with something he mentioned—between words—about a project of his own though. A free citation:
[…] I took a sabbatical year from the studio in which I created the tool I always wanted to have: a content management system, not only for web, but also for print.
At the words always wanted to have,
I knew the words content management system
were going to follow, and I knew they were referring to xPyth: an xml/xslt server, developed in Python.
A cms for everything: that's something I've been wanting to create for as long as I've been working with computers, pretty much. A cms that uses xml and xslt: that's something I've been dreaming about for a couple of years now.
Show me the road.
ACJ