[Edu-sig] Which shell to use

[kirby urner]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Gregor Lingl <gregor.lingl at aon.at> schrieb:

>
>  Some might prefer a monospaced font like the beautiful "Liberation Mono"
> (GNU General Public License) for instance. Using a non monospace font can be
> irritating sometimes concerning the indentation.
>
>
I should check that out.  Fonts that include big swatches of Unicode (such
as Kanji) should be fun as well.

Note that Akbar and other non-monospace aren't that bad for left-aligned
languages such as Python, FORTRAN etc., as the space characters share the
same width, so the block indentations appear as rigidly vertical as New
Courier's.



> Anyway IDLE is a very good choice for beginners, because it's small (and
> thus not distracting) but has everything you need during the first year of
> learning how to program. (In my experience it's disadvantageous to use an
> editor or an IDE that demands a substantial part of the learning energy and
> efforts of the students.)
>

It's also open source in Tkinter so you can scroll through quickly and get
an idea of what GUI-based Python is all about.  It's pretty easy to get
productive in a hurry with Tk bindings -- which is the chief weakness of
IDLE:  it makes for a crazy-bad Tk development environment, which is what
one might be inspired to do, having used IDLE.  That's when one starts
learning how to boot Python from a command line.

If you're not used to a command line, because you're an eye candy junky, on
either MacOS or Windows, then here's a golden opportunity to learn on.
 Then, after learning to go chdir, mkdir, rmdir and whatever, jump into
Python's os and shutils and accomplish the same things -- good
reinforcement.

Learning to love a command line is a core goal of "beginner mind" trainings.

Kirby
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