Notepad, however, is a proprietary text editor on a non-open-source OS.
OS is not a *religious* thing with me. In my case I was more than happy to pay the $20 (at the time) shareware fee for Textpad - a Windows based, closed source, editor which was configurable enough for me - easy to add Python (and PyGeo for that matter) syntax highlighting, easy to have the interpreter called with or without arguments That being said - I am making some conscious effort to do more on Linux and hope to be able to make it my default working environment. And that more out of principle than convenience.
DrScheme has rich on-line teaching resources. The language itself is able to negotiate on-line protocols such as http, although the tutorials don't focus on this so much. Given Scheme is as capable in principle of doing CGI type stuff and Python or Perl, it'd make sense to have more demos and examples of this in the Scheme syllabi (both on-line and book form), likewise XML parsing. Many times, this is where students are focussed, on web server issues.
Not looking to knock DrScheme. But my experience was my experience. And hopefully I am not doing any harm by reporting my experience to Mathias. I have never experienced DrScheme in the context of a formal curriculum. And since that is how it is intended to be used, Mathias should not be shocked that perhaps it does not work quite as well outside of that kind of setting.
This is true of both Python and DrScheme -- any text editor will do, but some are more "program editors" than text editors (like Vi and Emacs) meaning they're syntax aware.
If that is true of DrScheme it is very, very hard to understand it from inside it. I understand (now) that it is true of the Scheme implementation underlying DrScheme - but DrScheme itself did not get across to me that there was a way to run things from outside of itself. And I am hoping it never gets to the point where folks may run into the same kind of confusion (because you are probably right - I was confused) about IDLE - though I don't now see anything to indicate that things are on a trajectory where that is a real concern. Art