Devin Jeanpierre, 20.12.2011 08:32:
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.
I recently started using PyCharm personally, but not for my courses. There's a free OSS developers licence and it's a really nice (although young and somewhat resource hungry) IDE, but you can't really advocate a non-free IDE for teaching. "Buy me as a teacher, and, BTW, buy this IDE for everyone as well or I won't teach you"? Doesn't quite work.
For teaching, I think it's better to come around with something simpler than a full-blown IDE, so that you can show off interactive development, help() and other introspection features. IMHO much better than hiding all that behind an IDE, especially behind the additional complexity of an IDE. IPython is much better suited to present an interactive language like Python.
Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
