<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Jul 11, 2010, at 10:22 AM, Tal Einat wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Menlo; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; ">Most of the responses up to this point have been strongly against my<br>proposal. The main reason given is that it is nice to have a graphical<br>IDE supported out-of-the-box with almost any Python installation. This<br>is especially important for novice programmers and in teaching<br>environments. I understand this sentiment, but I think that supplying<br>a quirky IDE with many caveats, lacking documentation, some bugs and a<br>partially working debugger ends up causing more confusion than good.<br></span></span></blockquote><div><br></div><div>The people who are actually *in* those environments seem to disagree with you :). I think you underestimate the difficulty of getting software installed and overestimate the demands of new Python users and students.</div><div><br></div><div>While I don't ever use IDLE if there's an alternative available, I have been very grateful many times for its presence in environments where it was a struggle even to say "install Python". A workable editor and graphical shell is important, whatever its flaws. (And I think you exaggerate IDLE's flaws just a bit.)</div><div><br></div></div></body></html>