[Idle-dev] Removing IDLE from the standard library

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Jul 11, 2010, at 10:22 AM, Tal Einat wrote:

> Most of the responses up to this point have been strongly against my
> proposal. The main reason given is that it is nice to have a graphical
> IDE supported out-of-the-box with almost any Python installation. This
> is especially important for novice programmers and in teaching
> environments. I understand this sentiment, but I think that supplying
> a quirky IDE with many caveats, lacking documentation, some bugs and a
> partially working debugger ends up causing more confusion than good.

The people who are actually *in* those environments seem to disagree with you :).  I think you underestimate the difficulty of getting software installed and overestimate the demands of new Python users and students.

While I don't ever use IDLE if there's an alternative available, I have been very grateful many times for its presence in environments where it was a struggle even to say "install Python".  A workable editor and graphical shell is important, whatever its flaws.  (And I think you exaggerate IDLE's flaws just a bit.)

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