I too use only IDLE (in its VIDLE forked version) when writing Python programs, as is the case also of the many thousands of students in our intro physics curriculum, whether on Windows (about 80% of the users) or Mac (about 15%, the remaining 5% being Linux).
I have the strong impression, including from Jessica's talk, that IDLE is very objectionable to experienced programmers, and I would say simply that they shouldn't use it. There are plenty of sophisticated IDEs around; I myself use Eclipse for development work on VPython (the C++ part) and GlowScript (JavaScript). For the nonexpert programmers I deal with, and for that matter my own Python programming, IDLE is entirely adequate and appropriate. It would be extremely unfortunate if IDLE were changed to cater to expert programmers, leaving the novices and nonexperts in the lurch. My only concern about IDLE is that there seems to be no clear path for getting improvements into the distributed version of IDLE, which is why the VPython installer installs a version which for clarity is called VIDLE. VIDLE includes important improvements made by Guilherme Polo in a 2009 GSOC project for which I was a mentor, but despite it being a Python-approved project at that time there was no way for the improvements to get into the code base. I'm very pleased to see recent serious work on IDLE, and I think most of Polo's work has been salvaged. I very much hope that these improvements can be incorporated into the distributed IDLE, in which case I'll stop packing VIDLE with VPython. Bruce
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