[Tutor] idle??

[Danny Yoo]

>> So, where does IDLE fit into this....
>
> IDLE is a sad little “IDE”, which is really ugly, because it’s written
> in Tk. It lacks many IDE features. It comes with a really basic
> debugger (that doesn’t even highlight the line that is being currently
> executed…), function signature hinting, and some code completion.
>
> And it doesn’t even do something as basic as line numbering.

Hi Chris,

The quality of a beginner-level IDE might not necessarily be based on
the number of features it has.  For someone who's starting out, IDLE
is probably fine because it gets out of your way.  It lets you type
programs and evaluate them.  For a beginner, that might just be enough
to focus on learning the language.


(Aside: I've had the contrary experience with Eclipse, for example,
which is as full-featured as they come, but makes me feel like I'm
staring at the flight controls of a space shuttle, with all this stuff
about launchers and Luna and such.  I can get productive with it  It
takes my a long time to learn.  I suppose I could say the same thing
about Emacs.)


That is, many features might be a *distraction* from learning to
program.  Tools for beginners should be measured by criteria for
learning, and that might not match with the features we care about as
professional developers.  But maybe that's a controversial opinion.

I think IDLE is ok for what it's designed for: to provide a simple,
textual environment for writing and running simple Python programs.