On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 4:46 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:
Hiding it is not a good idea for anyone.
Tell that to Microsoft, which in Win 10 removed command prompt and other 'expert' tools from the regular start menu.
... but also added the Linux subsystem, making it rather more viable to recommend that people learn bash on all platforms. Not that bash is exactly a paragon of virtue and beauty, but it does at least have practicality and proven usefulness. I'd be all in favour of Windows users being pushed to IDLE rather than the vanilla REPL, and then taught that IDLE is the gateway to a bunch of other tools (including pip). But the shell is an important tool to learn too; I agree with Terry that it shouldn't be a prerequisite to learning Python, but I wouldn't be against it being the only way to do the more complicated tasks. For instance, maybe you can install packages using pip-gui, and you can list installed packages, but searching, uninstalling, etc are left to the command-line tool. Or whereever you draw the line. There's no point trying to put *everything* into the GUI. ChrisA