1. The broken interaction between Idle and the turtle package.
2. Poor documentation. To actually understand certain function
calls, it was necessary to read the turtle.py source code.
My tentative conclusion, reading the above, and from some personal experience, is the Tkinter turtle.py, while a fun demo, is mostly a toy and should not be used for serious teaching, at least on Windows. Too much adverse experience. Too much frustration. In general, Tk on Windows has a lot of problems -- I generally forsake IDLE and go to a command window, for good reason. IPython is an alternative (a good one -- once you get it working in Windows, which is very doable).
I really don't think *any* kind of turtle graphics is essential to learning programming, although as I said, I think the approach is very viable and destined to last. I'm not "anti turtle".
My own special interest is in going back to the very early days of Logo, when a physical robot was used. I'd rather have hardware robots than screen based ones, with Python bindings. SONY should seed me a prototype :-D
Kirby
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