The purpose of this site is to help building a rationalist community, and helping individuals to fulfill their potential in that domain.
We have a lot of discussions going on, and a lot of material is being, and going to be, generated. At some point it may become difficult for any single individual to follow all of it. Even taking the karma system into account, interesting contributions may be missed by any particular individual. Furthermore, the sum of what would be elaborated upon here would not be as concise or even easily available as it could be wished to be.
To the point : would it be a good idea to try to summarize the most important, relevant ideas upon which we will be building our edifice ? So that a future student of rationality can come upon a concise, easy to digest introduction to our results and ideas, so that less active members can still manage to follow this ongoing process too ?
If so, how would we proceed ? What is being discussed here may not have the quality we'd expect of, say, a scientific publication, though I think that such a quality would be necessary, if even sufficient, for what would eventually become our own corpus of knowledge. How would we elaborate, layer upon layer of work and discussions ? A starting point would be to refer to, or summarize the relevant, existing scientific results that we would lay our base upon. We'd then move on to summarizing our most important achievements, however that word is to be taken, seamlessly upon that foundation.
Any thought on how or whether to organize this?
There's a difference between not being able to work in Python, versus not being willing to work in Python. C, perl, ruby, php, even Java would be more appealing to me than touching Python with a ten-foot pole.
Also, presumably you want proficient developers working on the codebase. There's a difference between being able to pick up Python when you have to, versus understanding Python idioms and coding efficiently and bug-free.
ETA: this is getting WAY off-topic, and so I won't continue this thread. If you're interested in why someone wouldn't like Python, there are fires from the holy wars visible clearly from Google that you can go investigate.