[Tutor] Re: [Edu-sig] RE: [Idle-dev] IDLE's save-before-run requirement

[Patrick K. O'Brien]

I'm not 100% sure. I just have the impression that IDLE is too closely tied
to Tkinter, that Guido doesn't have as much time to devote to IDLE, that
Scintilla might remove part of the burden, and that Scintilla has been used
successfully by other tools, namely Boa and PythonWin. I just see a lot of
duplication of effort with basic editing/interactive functionality that
strikes me as a waste of resources. Here are the tools that I use that all
have separate code bases though they all borrowed from IDLE. (I don't really
want to use this many, but I have to for various reasons.)

IDLE
Boa Constructor
VPython (Visual Python)
PythonWin

Each of these is annoyingly different in rudimentary ways. For example, each
of these has separate keybindings and separate ways of modifying
keybindings. They don't all support the same command line options. They
don't all honor startup scripts. Not all python programs will run
successfully in all of these IDEs. Not all of these IDEs will run on all of
the platforms that Python itself will run on. Etc., etc.

There are just too darn many unnecessary variations, imho. I have spent way
too much time trying to get a productive environment in each of these tools
and getting them to all honor keystrokes and startup scripts that I find
useful.

To me it would be ideal if there were one or more core modules that
supported the editing of python files and interactive sessions. Each tool
would build on these modules for their own design goals, but the basics
would be there for everyone. The fact that all these tools have forked from
IDLE or borrowed heavily from IDLE suggests that there was something missing
or inadequate in the opinions of these other IDE developers. I'm trying to
understand what that missing element was and see if we can establish some
basic functionality, some architecture, rather than perpetuate this
diversity. I like Python because it has one right way for everything ...
except writing and running the actual code.

All I am asking is how do we apply the "one right way" attitude to the IDE
situation?

---
Patrick K. O'Brien
Orbtech
"I am, therefore I think."

-----Original Message-----
From: tutor-admin@python.org [mailto:tutor-admin@python.org]On Behalf Of
Israel Evans
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 4:49 PM
To: 'Guido van Rossum'; pobrien@orbtech.com
Cc: Mats Wichmann; idle-dev@python.org; Python Edu SIG; Python Tutor
Subject: RE: [Tutor] Re: [Edu-sig] RE: [Idle-dev] IDLE's save-before-run
requirement

What would switching over to using Scintilla accomplish that sticking with
IDLE and continuing it's development wouldn't?