Stephen Hansen wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Guilherme Polo <ggp...@gmail.com
> <mailto:ggp...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> By "never had a problem" do you mean using some of the latest versions
> ? Here, running "idle" from a mac terminal and trying to type: print
> "hi" crashes when entering the quotation mark.
>
>
> Huh? Works fine for me. Python 2.6.1, OSX 10.6.3, intel.
>
One of the good things about the python-dev community is its commitment
to test-driven development. If you are prepared to define "fine" as
'successfully runs \'print "hello"\'' then I guess we should be
perfectly happy about IDLE.
> From the lurking crowd-- Please don't consider removing IDLE until there
> is a compelling replacement ready. It's better to have a limited IDE
> that works everywhere (even if in a limited fashion-- people are free to
> try out one of the many excellent full-featured Python IDE's out there
> after they advance to that point) then not.
>
1: I refuse to see why we need a "compelling replacement" for a piece of
software whose performance might be actively deterring people from
taking up the language. ["Have you thought about Python?" "Yeah, but I
tried it {meaning "I downloaded some random Python release and tried
IDLE, which by modern standards appears completely lame"} and it
sucked". If this is our standard for "compelling" then it appears the
command-line interpreter is the competition.
2: Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the implied promise of including
something in the stdlib that there will be active maintainers? If that's
the case then we need to either recruit more active maintainers than the
package currently has or look at dropping it.
3: If IDLE *is* going to be dropped from the stdlib it should be
deprecated first just like anything else.
4: It's all very well chastising "the development community" because
IDLE issues get assigned to kbk and nothing happens about them, but it's
not like kbk is receiving any kind of rewards for working on these
tickets, and precious little indication that anyone else is prepared to
roll up their sleeves and ask to take over the tickets [apologies to
anyone who has actually done this and been rebuffed] to get them fixed
quicker.
5: Decide for yourself whether I am one of "the lurking crowd". I teach
Python classes for a living (among other things) and invest quite a bit
of time in the Python community one way or the other. I am not a Mac
user, but another instructor I have employed is, and he has discussed
with Mac users exactly how deficient the IDLE environment is when
compared with standard Mac utilities.
6: When I give students a free choice of the development environment,
they often choose IDLE "because it comes with Python". This usually
results in a certain amount of discussion and comparison with tools like
Wing, PythonWin and so on. Which in itself isn't a bad thing, but IDLE
complares so badly with the other products that I sometimes feel Python
suffers by association.
IDLE has simplicity on its side, but every way it interacts with the
user appears to be non-standard for most platforms. It needs some
maintenance, but I don't see where that's going to come from.
regards
Steve
--
Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119
DjangoCon US September 7-9, 2010 http://djangocon.us/
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