[Idle-dev] Fwd: hi, newbie questions

[phil jones]

Hi Tal,

thanks for the replies. I think I misread your mail the first couple
of times. Am I right in interpreting you as saying that in general
people don't see IDLE being developed into anything "grander" but you
personally disagree?

In which case, I assume the community are not against people trying to
re-use parts of IDLE in their own editors. Is there any tutorial
documentation explaining how IDLE is put together, and showing how to
extend it? I know there was something called IDEStudio that tried to
incorporate IDLE in a full IDE, but that seems to have vanished. Is it
dead? Was any documentation generated because of that? Also, how
intertwingled with Tk *is* IDLE. Would it be big or small job to port
it to a different GUI? Is there a good Model-View-Controller
separation?

Also, where do you personally want to take IDLE?

> In my opinion, which I have been trying to "push" for the past two years,
> IDLE is an awesome Python shell, which comes with a nice, simple editor,
> which integrates well with the shell. It's definitely great for learning and
> teaching Python, but IMO it's good for much more than that.

Yeah, seems like it shouldn't be that difficult to make more of it.
And I think being bundled with Python is a great opportunity.

Python is a language I really like; but like everyone I've been
impressed how Ruby has been riding high on the wave of Rails. It makes
you realize how important good tools and frameworks are. Seems like
Python lost a bit of momentum both in web-server space and for desktop
applications. I like some of the thinking behind PythonCard, although
that seems to be going pretty slowly too. Python should be a great
learning, scripting, whip-up-a-desktop-app. language to do the things
Visual Basic does. But the lack of a good development environment
seems to be holding it back. I'm sure fragmentation between Tk and
wxPython is part of that.

I'm not saying I'm looking for a VB *clone*. But it would be nice to
have something out-of-the-original-box that's comfortable to just go
with and start building apps.

> > 2) The main thing that drives me crazy with IDLE and makes it pretty
> > much unusuable for me is this. I like to develop with two files open,
> > one with the code I'm working on and a second with unit tests.
> > Obviously the unit-test file is the one I want to run and I import the
> > other file into it. It seems like IDLE only does this import once, so
> > that if I run the unit test, find a bug, fix the bug in the other file
> > and re-run the unit tests (by hitting F5), IDLE doesn't notice that
> > the code changed. So I then have to execute my program from the
> > windows command line instead of hitting F5.
> >
> > Is this really how IDLE behaves? Or am I just doing something wrong /
> > stpid and there's a way to get the behavior I want in IDLE?
>
> You're not doing much wrong - this is one of the "ugly bumps" I mentioned
> earlier. You're running IDLE without a subprocess - if you would run IDLE
> with a subprocess, this issue would be resolved. (it would work since the
> shell would be restarted each time you hit F5)
>
> If you run IDLE from the Start Menu on Windows, or run it without the -n
> flag on Unix/Linux/..., IDLE will run with a subprocess. On the other hand,
> when you use "Edit with IDLE" from the Windows Explorer context menu, or run
> IDLE with the -n flag, IDLE runs without a subprocess, and so the shell
> cannot be restarted.

> I have a patch which will finally resolve this issue posted on SourceForge,
> but it's not getting enough attention... I'm hoping to get it into Python2.6
> though.

Thanks. That makes sense and I think I can live with the workaround.
But looking forward to the patch.

> Is there any work going on on Tix or any Python GUI
> > frameworks which sit on top of Tk?
>
> Hasn't been under serious development for years, but maybe there's some hope
> left for it yet...
>
> Check out Tcl/Tk's website:  http://www.tcl.tk/

I had a look but didn't see anything interesting.

I used to use Tcl quite a lot at work, but can't see any reason these
days that I'd choose it over Python. I wonder why Perl / Python / Ruby
have let themselves be so dependent on Tk. I wonder if there's any
move to create a new common toolkit on top of something else (eg. Gtk
or wxWindows) and have *it* as standard in things like Python and
Ruby. Perhaps it would be possible to even make Python's Tkinter wrap
this new library directly so as not to break existing code?

> Also check out the Tile project, which aims to allow Tk GUI to look like
> most common GUI frameworks (Windows classic and WinXP to name  a few)

Looks interesting ...

Actually something else which I see on the horizon and may prove
interesting is the work going on to get Python talking with Gecko /
XUL ( http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/My_Chrome_Oven:_Generating_XUL_with_Python)

Anyone know anything about that? Perhaps the right way to go is to
build desktop apps. on top of Gecko and help yourself to XUL / HTML /
CSS for the UI components. I heard that Komodo is built that way?

Anyway thanks for all the useful info. and for listening :-)

phil jones