[Idle-dev] /me waves

[Terry Reedy]

On 3/21/2013 10:37 AM, Katie Cunningham wrote:

Katie, name-calling, which you did on your blog, and came close to here, 
is not accepted in the Python development community.

You wrote, with respect to IDLE, on a line by itself, without a smiley, 
with blank lines around it, so no one could miss it, the following.
"

Too bad it's broke as hell.

"
http://therealkatie.net/blog/2013/mar/19/pycon-2013-young-coders/

A couple of days ago, a Python developer who strongly dislikes IDLE 
started a thread on the pydev (Python developer) list which started with 
quoting the lines before your negative comment and ended with it, 
leaving out the line after. He went on to say that IDLE is quirky, ugly, 
badly maintained, useless, a disgrace to Python, and should be 
quarantined in a separate repository. Others chimed in, like #5 on your 
blog, 'yeah, IDLE is broken', etcetera, etcetera, and opined that IDLE 
should not be quarantined but should be removed from Python altogether.

Whatever your intent, your comment was used as ammunition to block IDLE 
improvement, at least for this week. Perhaps you can understand now why 
I did not think it very funny.

----
Now, what was my supposed crime?

First, I parodied your comment. People *do* make exaggerated comments in 
blogs to get attention.

> Too bad people exaggerate like hell -- especially in blog posts ;-).

Second, I let you know that I was ignorant of what you might have 
actually meant, in any detail.

> I use IDLE almost daily and it works for me, especially with some of
> the more recent fixes. I have worked on IDLE issues on and off for
> over a year. But I have no idea what *you* think is 'broken as hell'.

Third, I invited you here to enlighten me as to your priorities for 
improving IDLE. There are numerous IDLE issue I could work on. I gave 
you a chance to influence my priorities. Let me ask it differently. 
Based on your experience, what IDLE issue most gets in the way of kids 
just starting out with IDLE and Python?

> Given your experience teaching with IDLE, I would be very interested
> in knowing what you think are the top 3 or so outstanding issues. As
> well as here, you could also post to the idle-dev list,
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/idle-dev, which is mirrored as
> gmane.org newsgroup gmane.comp.python.idle.

Fourth, I let you know that IDLE has been actively improved, and 
hopefully will be again, which means a) that any released version you 
might be using is obsolete* and b) that 'soon' will be is a good time 
for others to join in on improving it.

> You did not specify which Python version you used, but since 3.3.0
> there have been about 30 patches pushed.  I hope to see than many
> again in not too many months. You are welcome to join us to help make
> that happen.

* You said on your blog 2.7, which was last released as 2.7.3 last 
April. That means it does not have the fix I committed last summer to 
fix the problem of IDLE sometimes crashing when one typed '('. That was 
broken. I would even agree with 'broken as hell' with respect to that 
particular issue. The fix should be in the 2.7.4 release in about a week.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy