[Idle-dev] IDLE in UK Schools

[Terry Reedy]

On 8/4/2015 12:34 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I like the proposal. Let's re-imagine IDLE with solely beginners in mind.

I want to retry responding to Chris and Guido.

I am delighted that others are re-thinking, re-conceptualizing, 
re-imagining Idle.

I am delighted that Guido approves.  This initially surprised me, but 
let's ignore that. Guido, the main thing we needed from you was just 
this, approval to make real changes. I think we are otherwise good to go.

The main things I want are the same things that everyone here seems to want:
1. Debug and polish the features and displays we have now;
this includes adding the ttk option, simplyfing, and re-arranging.
2. Extend the use of tabs to editor panes and other frames.
3. Combine frames and panes into an coherent application rather than 
have a separate window for everything.

PEP 434 permits change 1 in all versions.  But it requires further 
discussion before applying changes 2 and 3 in current versions.  I 
believe use of a tabbed editor in a window could easily be optional, as 
planned for ttk.  Then the same logic for applying to current versions 
might be accepted.  I will bring that up with Nick and others when a 
patch is ready.  Change 3 is currently too far off to worry about.

I think beginners might benefit from better support for drawing and 
simple games.  When we have an application window, a turtle screen could 
be added by copying code from turtledemo.

What might help would be a tkinter module that includes a simple Plot 
class, an m x n GameBoard class, an Animation class based on tk's 
.after(milliseconds) method, some basic animation functions, and some 
other things. This would not be in idlelib, and would at least start on 
PyPI. Checking PyPI now, I found a few games implemented in tkinter but 
no library classes like the above.

I will likely not have internet access for a few days.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy