[Idle-dev] Removing IDLE from the standard library

[Bruce Sherwood]

On the notion that IDLE is fatally flawed and is driving away potential
users of Python (to put the statements in their most extreme form):

It seems that there are (at least) two very different communities people
have in mind. I can appreciate that highly expert programmers may find IDLE
insufficient for their needs, and it might even be the case that these
people should be advised not to even try IDLE. But I want to stress as
strongly as possible that for a very large community of nonexpert users of
Python, IDLE has been extremely important and works very well for their
purposes. Editing is pretty much like what they're already used to in word
processors, which is certainly not the case with professional tools such as
vim or Emacs.

That said, yes, there are some significant deficiencies with the current
IDLE (which is why there's a VIDLE, for instance). I'm very glad to hear
from Martin that Guilherme is free to commit his important bug fixes and
improvements. I'm afraid that neither Guilherme nor I understood the
procedures and thought that we had to wait for others to act.

Bruce Sherwood
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