[Tutor] Python Versions

[Michael Langford]

There are 3 big schools of "how do you program" as far as what tools
you have open where.

IDE Geeks: "the author" you are reading about is one if them. This
means you run eclipse, idle, visual studio, kdevelop, etc, and you
debug and run out of that as well if you can. This is what most
primarily Microsoft platform developers do. These people look at
Editor and Shell geeks as if they are stuck in the 70's, even if the
developers in question they're looking at weren't alive then, or were
at least still messing their britches when Regan was inaugurated as
the POTUS.

Editor Geeks: These are the guys who make Vim or Emacs do everything
an IDE can do. They run their programs, debug their program, edit
their programs, probably check-in their programs and throw templates
down in the middle of their programs, all without leaving their
favorite editor. Sometimes they'll have an extra shell or two open to
look at another file, but the true hardcore editor geek uses buffers,
and can tell you why they do so for a good hour.

Shell Geeks: These guys have 3-10 shell windows open at a time. While
this is a bit of a continuum with the Editor geeks, these guys tend to
learn unix text processing tools to a almost magic degree. They can't
remember enough key bindings to be an editor geek, and they cringe at
all the mousing and hidden stuff going on in an IDE. These people can
write webservers with netcat and xargs if allowed to do so (they
should not *ever* be allowed to do so).

***

Usually which camp you're in is a historical oddity of where you've
done most of your programming, or at least, where you got good at it.
They IDE people have one thing going for them, that being mousing is
usually a little faster than remembering key sequences, although the
people remembering key sequences perceive themselves taking less time.
A lot of IDE people never really sink their teeth into the huge set of
immensely powerful unix tools out there (which work on windows too via
Cygwin and MinGW), and IDE editors are usually less powerful than a
vim or emacs (which usually operate on a block and word level rather
than a character level IDE editors usually function on).

Me personally, I'm a Shell Geek who's picking up more vim every year
(And bought the excellent VimEmu suite to get Vim keybindings in
Visual Studio and Outlook and Word). I have designed and implemented
huge projects without an IDE.  Then again, I use IDE's when people on
the project do and need to easily be able to work with me.

As far as python goes, it doesn't matter as long as you don't use tabs
:o). All of the above techniques can do that, so its all hunky dory.
Try each though, they'll make you learn something you didn't know, at
least how to talk to the other types of Geek.

           --Michael


On 12/13/07, earlylight publishing <earlylightpublishing at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Actually the first thing I noticed is the author would say something like
> "you can run the program by pressing F5 or selecting "run program" from the
> "run" menu.  Neither of those things work from the shell.  Saving programs
> also didn't work well for me when I put them in the shell.  Do people really
> write whole applications just using the shell?
>
>
>
> "earlylight publishing" <earlylightpublishing at yahoo.com> wrote
>
> >I have the latest python version too when I first started "A Byte of
> >Python"
> > my code wouldn't work either.  My problem was that I was programming
> > in the shell (the screen with the three '>>>' on it).  I found when
> > I wrote
> > the examples in a new window (cntrl+N) they all worked as
> > advertized.
>
> Unless you are doing some strange GUI type things it should work at
> the >>> prompt too. (Sometimes you need an extra line - that could
> fox beginners I suspect, if his examples contain multiple statements)
>
> > He never mentions that you need to use an 'editing window'
> > (I think it's called).  I just stumbled across the fact.
>
> You shouldn't need to use an editing window, but the >>> prompt
> does execute each line 9or block) in turn thus:
>
> x=0
> for n in range(5):
>     x = n+x
> print x
>
> looks like this in IDLE:
>
> >>> x=0
> >>> for n in range(5):
>     x = n+x
>                                             <--Extra line
> here!
> >>> print x
> 10
> >>>
>
> Is that the kind of thing you are seeing?
>
>
>
>
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>
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-- 
Michael Langford
Phone: 404-386-0495
Consulting: http://www.RowdyLabs.com