On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 18:20, Tal Einat <talei...@gmail.com> wrote: > The (hopefully) compelling arguments were others, such as the sentence > following the one you quoted: > > "I think that in its current state, IDLE may still be helpful for > learning Python, but it is more likely to drive away users who run > into its various quirks and problems." > > Having taught a few Python courses myself, I must say that while not perfect [I had to apologize for some IDLE issues, which shamed me into filing bugs/patches for some of them], it is *better* for interactive use than most other IDEs! That's IMHO the #1 is the real reason that makes it ideal for teaching, not the fact that it's bundled with Python. I wouldn't mind telling people "install Python and X" instead of "install Python", but very few Python environments do multiline history correctly :-(.
The only one I know that beats IDLE is Dreampie (designed by Noam Raphael, a long time IDLE contributor). However, without an editor and F5 it's not a winner for teaching. For the record, I'm -42 on removing IDLE from the distribution (unless you have a better replacement?), but +1 on widening commit access and setting up one obvious way for users to try bleeding-edge IDLE. -0 on extracting it from the stdlib (it's one way to implement the above, not sure if best way). But here's a thought: why not make IDLE an early adopter of Mercurial? It seems to me that could ease a lot of the issues: - contributors will be able to publish their changes without waiting for official commiters - contributors will be able to maintain "beefed up" IDLE branches with much less pain - trying out bleeding-edge branches would be much simpler - I expect a de-facto "stable" IDLE branch will emerge from the community -- Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin <c...@users.sf.net>
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