[Pythonmac-SIG] install again?

[Kevin Walzer]

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Charles Hartman wrote:
> 
> There are a lot of programming environments on the Mac besides
> Applescript that work from the GUI without any need to delve. Runtime
> Revolution and Breve are two examples that come to mind immediately. I'm
> thinking, for example, of someone who has worked in one of those
> very-high-level environments and wants to deepen her/his understanding
> and control. 

I haven't heard of breve, but RunRev is an expensive, proprietary IDE.
One of the things you get for the dollars you spend is button-pushing
convenience: everything is there, easily accessed. You can just start
coding without fiddling with configuration. And because you're paying
several hundred dollars for the full-featured IDE, that's the way it
should be. You're paying someone else to sweat the details of
implementation.


> No, the Terminal stuff isn't difficult. You find out (though as I recall
> it is *not* immediately obvious) that there are only a few simple things
> you need to learn to do. The point is that you're now engaged, however
> peripherally, with a whole other huge set of questions and conditions,
> and suddenly the learning curve for Python *looks* much steeper. The
> problem, as I see it, is that you encounter this stuff right at the very
> beginning. Everything for getting started with Python is off-the-shelf
> easy -- except of course that to get it running you just have to add the
> following lines to your profile and . . . what?? You start looking at
> docs, and quickly encounter references to directories that you can't
> even find among the folders on your OSX filesystem.

I suppose if some company saw a business case for it--i.e., people would
buy it--then they could package up a binary distribution of Python that
handles *all* of the implementation details, i.e. it not only installs
everything in the right place but configures your environment for you,
and also makes it easy to install extension packages, and perhaps even
provides a slick IDE on top of it.

But really, the binary distributions provided by Bob and ActiveState and
Robin accomplish about 80% of this already. What's required from the
user, under this scenario, is a small investment of time (as compared to
a large investment of time building everything yourself, or a large
investment of dollars buying a fully-configured environment).

Not to mention: Bob and Ronald and others are sweating all the details,
on-list, of getting Python to build as a universal binary. I sure
wouldn't want to have to figure that out for myself.

Kevin
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