[Tutor] Recommendations for best tool to write/run Python

[Matt Williams]

I teach an introductory programming course to medical students (and a few
doctors).

I would look at Sublime Text 2 if one Windows/ Mac. Has a 'nag' screen to
remind you to buy, but feels simple enough when you start it.

M

On Wed, 2 Mar 2016 19:50 Ben Finney, <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

> Lisa Hasler Waters <lwaters at flinthill.org> writes:
>
> > Ben, in terms of time for learning curve, I suppose we do have some
> > limitations as we are up against school schedules. However, if it is
> > something I could learn in a reasonable time that I could then more
> > quickly walk my students through then I'd be up for the challenge!
>
> In that case, my recommendation is to learn a good programmer's editor,
> and let your students gain exposure to that.
>
> Emacs and Vim are the unchallenged masters here; community-owned,
> free-software, cross-platform, mature and highly flexible with support
> for a huge range of editing tasks. Learning either of those will reward
> the student with a tool they can use broadly throughout whatever
> computing career they choose.
>
> They aren't a small investment, though. That “mature” comes at the cost
> of an entire ecosystem that evolved in decades past; concepts and
> commands are idiosynratic in each of them. It is highly profitable for
> any programmer to learn at least one of Emacs or Vim to competence, but
> it may be too much to confront a middle-school student in limited class
> time. Maybe let the class know they exist, at least.
>
> Short of those, I'd still recommend a community-owned, free-software,
> highly flexible programmer's editor. If you're on GNU+Linux, use the
> Kate or GEdit editors; they integrate very nicely with the default
> desktop environment and are well-maintained broadly applicable text
> editors. GEdit in particular has good Python support.
>
> I would recommend staying away from any language-specific IDE. Teaching
> its idiosyncracies will still be a large time investment, but will not
> be worth it IMO because the tool is so limited in scope. Better to teach
> a powerfuly general-purpose programmer's editor, and use the operating
> system's facilities for managing files and processes.
>
> --
>  \        “Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it |
>   `\     has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has |
> _o__)            been playful, rebellious, and immature.” —Tom Robbins |
> Ben Finney
>
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