Python education survey

[K Richard Pixley]

On 12/19/11 19:51 , Raymond Hettinger wrote:
> Do you use IDLE when teaching Python?
> If not, what is the tool of choice?

> If your goal is to quickly get new users up and running in Python,
> what IDE or editor do you recommend?

I would:

a) let the students pick their own editor.
b) encourage emacs and use emacs as a reference editor.

The problem is that IDLE is hard to set up.  (I've never managed it and 
I'm a well seasoned veteran).  And pretty much only good for python, I'd 
expect.  You'd do better to encourage eclipse, but setting that up isn't 
trivial either.  You could create your own distribution of eclipse, but 
then you have that "only useful for python" problem again.

If students are going to go anywhere else after this class, they're 
going to need to either be able to learn to switch editors or find an 
editor they can use more generally.  Everyone ends up writing some html 
eventually, for instance.  Either way requires climbing a learning curve 
that would be difficult to justify for a single class.

OTOH, there are binary emacs distributions for all systems you've 
mentioned.  And they work.

I'm an antimicrosoft bigot, but I think my answer is probably the same 
regardless of whether we know the OS the students will be using or not.

--rich