On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 11:06 AM, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: > There have been discussions, such as today on Idle-sig , about who uses Idle > and who we should design it for. If you use Idle in any way, or know of or > teach classes using Idle, please answer as many of the questions below as > you are willing, and as are appropriate
When I'm talking to my students about interactive Python on Windows, I'll sometimes recommend Idle. It's not any sort of official thing, but when they're having issues (particularly if they're tinkering with a 'while' or 'for' loop, as Idle recalls those as coherent units instead of fetching up individual lines), I'll point them to it as another way to tackle a problem. Usually on Linux or Mac OS they're better able to manage with the console interpreter and readline, but Windows sucks so Idle has a bigger advantage (plus, a lot of Linux distro-supplied Pythons don't include Idle, whereas I can be fairly confident that a Windows Python will have it). > 1. Are you > grade school (1=12)? > undergraduate (Freshman-Senior)? > post-graduate (from whatever)? I'm a high school dropout; my students probably cover all three of those categories. > 2. Are you > beginner (1st class, maybe 2nd depending on intensity of first)? > post-beginner? Usually Idle is mentioned only in the context of the very early explorations. After that, it's all "use a text editor, and then run it", and students use whichever editors they like. Most don't ask about editor options. Possibly I'd recommend Idle's editor mode in some cases, but it's usually more convenient to have a single editor which also understands HTML and CSS, as this is a web programming course. > 3. With respect to programming, are you > amateur (unpaid) > professional (paid for programming) Pro. A lot of my students are currently amateurs; a decent number are professional and moving around in skillset. (Do you count as a pro programmer if you're currently paid to work with Excel macros, and you're learning Python so you can do better? Line gets blurry.) If Idle didn't exist, it wouldn't kill what I'm doing, but it is a convenient option to have around. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
