[Pythonmac-SIG] install again?

[Charles Hartman]

Of course I don't disagree with any of this (except that a version of  
Revolution is available under academic license for about $60 as I  
recall). *Certainly* I'm grateful for the work Bob, Ronald, and  
others are doing to make the whole edifice stand up. I'm not  
complaining. I'm speculating that if the (rather small) gaps in the  
unpack-it-and-run scenario were filled, there might be a useful  
additonal user base for Python on the Mac. That's all.

Charles


On Feb 6, 2006, at 11:19 AM, Kevin Walzer wrote:

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> Charles Hartman wrote:
>>
>> There are a lot of programming environments on the Mac besides
>> Applescript that work from the GUI without any need to delve. Runtime
>> Revolution and Breve are two examples that come to mind  
>> immediately. I'm
>> thinking, for example, of someone who has worked in one of those
>> very-high-level environments and wants to deepen her/his  
>> understanding
>> and control.
>
> I haven't heard of breve, but RunRev is an expensive, proprietary IDE.
> One of the things you get for the dollars you spend is button-pushing
> convenience: everything is there, easily accessed. You can just start
> coding without fiddling with configuration. And because you're paying
> several hundred dollars for the full-featured IDE, that's the way it
> should be. You're paying someone else to sweat the details of
> implementation.
>
>
>> No, the Terminal stuff isn't difficult. You find out (though as I  
>> recall
>> it is *not* immediately obvious) that there are only a few simple  
>> things
>> you need to learn to do. The point is that you're now engaged,  
>> however
>> peripherally, with a whole other huge set of questions and  
>> conditions,
>> and suddenly the learning curve for Python *looks* much steeper. The
>> problem, as I see it, is that you encounter this stuff right at  
>> the very
>> beginning. Everything for getting started with Python is off-the- 
>> shelf
>> easy -- except of course that to get it running you just have to  
>> add the
>> following lines to your profile and . . . what?? You start looking at
>> docs, and quickly encounter references to directories that you can't
>> even find among the folders on your OSX filesystem.
>
> I suppose if some company saw a business case for it--i.e., people  
> would
> buy it--then they could package up a binary distribution of Python  
> that
> handles *all* of the implementation details, i.e. it not only installs
> everything in the right place but configures your environment for you,
> and also makes it easy to install extension packages, and perhaps even
> provides a slick IDE on top of it.
>
> But really, the binary distributions provided by Bob and  
> ActiveState and
> Robin accomplish about 80% of this already. What's required from the
> user, under this scenario, is a small investment of time (as  
> compared to
> a large investment of time building everything yourself, or a large
> investment of dollars buying a fully-configured environment).
>
> Not to mention: Bob and Ronald and others are sweating all the  
> details,
> on-list, of getting Python to build as a universal binary. I sure
> wouldn't want to have to figure that out for myself.
>
> Kevin
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