My university (University of Toronto) helped design Wing 101, and uses it exclusively in introductory courses.
Overall, the only major sticking points that I saw (as a TA who helped with the code labs and setup) were installation issues on OS X (relating to X11) and some confusion on when the embedded interactive interpreter gets refreshed ("hit run first"). It's a "big" editor with lots of buttons, but IME students are good at ignoring things. Truthfully I'm not sure why it's great for teaching, though. And there were some discussions I overheard about perhaps switching to PyCharm, which at least one professor thought was much better. And I personally prefer simpler editors for my own use, not just for educational purposes. Eh. -- Devin On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:51 PM, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettin...@gmail.com> wrote: > Do you use IDLE when teaching Python? > If not, what is the tool of choice? > > Students may not be experienced with the command-line and may be > running Windows, Linux, or Macs. Ideally, the tool or IDE will be > easy to install and configure (startup directory, path, associated > with a particular version of Python etc). > > Though an Emacs user myself, I've been teaching with IDLE because it's > free; it runs on multiple OSes, it has tooltips and code colorization > and easy indent/dedent/comment/uncomment commands, it has tab > completion; it allows easy editing at the interactive prompt; it has > an easy run-script command (F5); it has direct access to source code > (File OpenModule) and a class browser (Cntl+B). > > On the downside, some python distros aren't built with the requisite > Tcl/Tk support; some distros like the Mac OS ship with a broken Tcl/Tk > so users have to install a fix to that as well; and IDLE sometimes > just freezes for no reason. It also doesn't have an easy way to > specify the startup directory. > > If your goal is to quickly get new users up and running in Python, > what IDE or editor do you recommend? > > > Raymond > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list