[Python-ideas] Yielding from the command line

[Andrew Barnert]

On Sep 12, 2014, at 10:25, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 09:20:43AM -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
>> Anyway, don't most people use IPython these days?
> 
> Not so far as I can see from the questions asked on the tutor and 
> python-list mailing lists.

It's a lot more common on StackOverflow than on the lists for some reason. IDLE, PyDev, and especially PyCharm are definitely growing faster among askers, but there's still a good amount of IPython, and not just in the numpy questions. Also, most of the prolific answerers seem to use IPython, although it's less visible than it used to be, because everyone got sick of all the followup questions saying "I got a syntax error on that 'In  [3]:' part."

> Windows users seem to mostly use IDLE, 
> Linux users the vanilla Python interactive interpreter, and when a Mac 
> user asks a question I normally faint from the shock and don't notice 
> what they're using :-)

Most of the Python devs I know use Macs. 

And there are definitely more Mac questions than Linux on StackOverflow. But half of them are trying to figure out how to deal with the 2 extra copies of Python 2.7 they installed because of 5 blog posts all telling them that Apple still only ships 2.5 even though it's 2008 and offering different solutions to that burning problem. Since most of them are determined to avoid learning what $PATH means, they don't get to the point of having code to ask about beyond "import spam" failing even though "pip install spam" succeeded.