Yes, we're currently using VIDLE, but the differences between VIDLE and IDLE are not significant in the context of the criticisms of IDLE, and moreover, thanks to Terry's and other work, I'm hopeful that it will soon be possible to abandon VIDLE.
Upon reflection, I think I may see why Jessica feels that IDLE is unsuitable for her new users and why I find it quite adequate. I think she's teaching programming and computer science, so that even if the people are new to programming it makes sense to introduce them right from the start to procedures and tools that are appropriate for computing professionals. The audience I try to serve is very different, engineering and science students in the two-semester "calculus-based" intro physics course they are required to take. Ruth Chabay and I have integrated computational modeling into this course, which is highly unusual but extremely important, given that computational modeling is co-equal with theory and experiment, not just in physics but in all STEM disciplines (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Alas, computational modeling is way under-represented in undergraduate STEM education, and we're trying to address that problem. We want the students to write complete algorithms for modeling physical systems, which means no black boxes: no fancy numerical integration techniques or canned functions, and no simply adjusting parameters in an existing model. The problem is that few of these students have ever written a computer program before, and there isn't time to teach programming, much less computer science, in the crowded physics course. Python has proven to be adequately clean and simple that we can get students up and running very quickly (we teach a very small subset of Python -- what is a variable, an assignment statement, a while loop, and an if statement). And VPython lets them make navigable 3D animations as a side effect of their physics computations. For these students, in this course, IDLE is the right editor to use. It comes with Python (or currently VIDLE comes with VPython), and there's almost nothing to learn because all the student will do with it is edit a program, run it, make changes, and run again. Nothing about breakpoints or dealing with multiple files, etc. On a loosely related topic, there is a long thread on the Brython forum initiated by me that has led to the Brython people taking it as an interesting challenge and use of Brython to make it possible to write GlowScript programs in Python, by writing a Brython wrapper of the GlowScript libraries, which are written in JavaScript: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups&hl=en#!topic/brython/p2oz_BK1_3A Billy Earney quickly mocked up a partial proof of concept that made it possible for the first time to see something resembling Python using the GlowScript libraries to display a rotating 3D cube, with mouse interactions to rotate and zoom the camera. I'm delighted that they've taken an interest in this. Bruce On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 7:32 PM, phil jones <inters...@gmail.com> wrote: > But if I understand correctly, you're using VIDLE not IDLE? Or did I > get that wrong? > >
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