On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Massimo Di Pierro <massimo.dipierro@gmail.com> wrote:
50+% of the students have a mac and an increasing number of packages depend on numpy. Installing numpy on mac is a lottery.
Those who do not have a mac have windows and they expect an IDE like eclipse. I know you can use Python with eclipse but they do not. They download Python and complain that IDLE has no autocompletion, no line numbers, no collapsible functions/classes.
At the University of Toronto we tell students to use the Wing IDE (Wing 101 was developed specifically for our use in the classroom, in fact). All classroom examples are done either in the interactive interpreter, or in a session of Wing 101. All computer lab sessions are done using Wing 101, and the first lab is dedicated specifically for introducing how to edit files with it and use its debugging features. If students don't like IDLE, tell them to use a different editor instead, and pretend that Python doesn't include one with itself. (By default IDLE only shows an interactive session, so if they get curious and click-y they'll still be in the dark.) -- Devin