[Python-Dev] IDLE in the stdlib

[Nick Coghlan]

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 5:26 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> I showed IDLE to my 6-year-old on the Raspberry Pi and I'm convinced
> it is cool. Gave up on trying to (slowly) install bpython. We were
> multiplying large numbers and counting to 325,000 in no time. It might
> not be for *me* but I'm not going to teach my daughter a large IDE any
> time soon.

This, 1000x this.

It was helping out at the Young Coders tutorials that convinced me we
need to continue shipping IDLE, or something like it, for use by
*people learning to use computers as more than just passive consumers
for the first time*. This means running well on Windows and the
Raspberry Pi at this point.

Keeping IDLE in the core represents a commitment to the use of Python
as a teaching language both inside and outside of formal educational
settings.

We can refactor IDLE to make aspects of it easier to test with the
buildbots, especially now that we have unittest.mock in the standard
library to mock out some of the UI interaction in the test suite. (I'm
happy to help coach the IDLE devs on that if they want to start
improving the test suite coverage for the IDLE code)

I think we should commit to making "start with IDLE" the recommended
teaching experience, and then focus on *making that experience
awesome*. Once people are already familiar with the language and what
it can do for them, they may choose to move on to other tools, or they
may decide to stick with IDLE. But deciding on "What is IDLE?" and
"Why is it part of the CPython development repo?" is a necessary step
to revitalising it and stopping the recurring discussions about taking
it out.

If Terry is willing to recast his PEP in that light, I think that
would be a wonderful thing to do.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia