[Python-Dev] IDLE in the stdlib

[Terry Reedy]

On 3/21/2013 11:21 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> 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)

Thank for for the offer to help. I added you to the IDLE test issue.
http://bugs.python.org/issue15392
Improving tests is one of the main things I personally want to do. Roger 
is expert at tkinter code, so I will focus on other things. I want to 
work toward IDLE patches following the standard rule of adding at least 
one test with every patch. A permanent exemption from that rule is *not* 
part of the PEP.

> 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.

I completely agree ;-). I asked Todd to help with this, and perhaps you 
can give me some more concrete hints as to what you would like to see where.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy