Announcing PythonTurtle

[Gregor Lingl]

cool-RR schrieb:
> Hello,
> 
> I wanted to announce that I have just released my little side project,
> PythonTurtle.
> Here is its website:
> http://pythonturtle.com
> 
> Its goal is to be the lowest-threshold way to learn (or teach) Python.
> You can read more about it and download it on the website.
> 
> Ram.

Hi Ram,

that's indeed a nice starting point for kids to doing turtle graphics, 
although currently it seems to implement only a very small subset of 
Python's turtle module's capabilities, even less than those of the old 
turtle module (that shipped with Python upto 2.5).

Moreover I have to complain that you decided to use different commands 
for the turtle's actions - go instead of forward, turn instead of left 
and right etc. First I think left and right are more intuitive than turn 
as they do not need negative angles as arguments, which might matter for 
young children. Also I cannot see the advantage of cammands like 
visible() or invisible() over showturtle() and hideturtle()

But second even kids - when learning how to program - will arrive at a 
point where it's no more problem to use an editor like IDLE so they
could easily switch to Python's turtle module. That would be even easier 
if they had not to learn a new command set.

Moreover a learning environment like PythonTurtle needs something like 
an editor - at least a simple one - in order to create programs that can 
be run repeatedly. Coding, that's creating programs - not only issuing
a sequence of cammands interactively.

It would be certainly a good thing if one had a similar environment 
using Tkinter, preferably also as part of the standard distribution of 
Python accompanying the turtle module. I think it should not be that 
difficult to create a GUI of this sort combining IDLE's shell window, 
its editor and turtle.py. Alas, at the moment I'm too busy with some 
othr work to start a project like this. Perhaps someone else might be 
interested? I'd enjoy to join a team doing it.

Finally I'd like to stress, that the aims of PythonTurtle and Python's
turtle module are quite different - as one could grasp easily by trying
out the collection of examples at python-turtle-demo.googlecode.com that 
I posted in another posting. Anyway they could very well complement one 
another in some more mature state of development.

Best regards,
Gregor