[Pythonmac-SIG] New Page, first proposal

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 8, 2006, at 2:42 PM, Charles Hartman wrote:

> I'm afraid that you're right about this, and I think it's the biggest
> obstacle to the project of getting (non-Unix) Mac users interested in
> Python when they go looking for a language, or just looking to get
> started on programming.
>
> Does the old PythonIDE come with OSX's Python?

No, it has never shipped with Mac OS X.

The old Python IDE is dead, forget it ever existed.  It hasn't been  
touched in god knows how many years and a dependency it has is "non- 
free" and not available for i386.

> I really feel -- do people really think I'm wrong about this? -- that
> even PythonIDE, limited as it is, is a better beginners'
> recommendation than the Terminal.

It's not even an option, we'd need to pick something else.  IDLE is  
the only suitable library candidate for a beginners IDE, but only on  
Mac OS X 10.4 and later (since 10.3 did not ship with Tcl/Tk).

Technically IDLE should even work on a stock Mac OS X 10.4 system if  
the user went to the scary terminal and typed:

	pythonw -c "import idlelib.idle"

-bob