[Pythonmac-SIG] Mac User Python Newbies

[Charles Hartman]

On Feb 13, 2005, at 5:00 PM, has wrote:

> There's a paradox at work here. What newbies need from an IDE is _very 
> different_ to what experienced users expect from one.

I don't think I agree with this. Or rather, I don't really see why it 
should be true. I don't think the issue is the lack of a toddler chair 
for absolute beginners.

I'll go out on a limb and declare myself Typical of a certain kind of 
newbie. I come to Python on the Mac as somebody used to the Mac 
interface (I never trusted myself to *open* Terminal until a few months 
ago), who had programmed in C and other languages, mostly under DOS 
years ago.

The gap for a lot of us isn't at the *very* beginning; the Mac Python 
IDE is great for learning syntax and some main modules. But very early 
on, most of us want to write something with a windows-and-buttons 
interface. So you settle -- in ignorance! -- on a package (wx, tk, 
whatever), and an editor (TextWrangler is excellent, and free); and 
then what? To run the code you write, and to figure out why it won't 
run, you have to go out of the editor into . . . what? The Terminal, 
and Unix, and pdb . . . This is a lot to learn. It feels as though your 
next step after "name = cardString[0:15]" and "import string" (or 
rather, no, that was an old tutorial, we don't do that any more . . .) 
is to learn Unix.

OK, I *know* that's a wild exaggeration -- I'm talking about the 
perception. (Sudo, is he that anime director? Why can't my module find 
my other module?) Having worked on this for a while, I know that 
there's not all that much you have to know just to move forward -- but 
there's not much around to help you figure what you need right away and 
what can wait. For the beginner, the Terminal is a place of maximum 
entropy: a wonderful variety of ways to do things right, and ten 
thousand ways to do them wrong, sometimes with very messy results.

Oh and by the way, somebody who comes at it like this very probably has 
"cross-platform" as a firm wish -- that's one of the reasons for 
turning to Python.

So an environment (in the vernacular, not the Unix sense) is what the 
beginner needs -- an IDE from within which everything you need to do 
can be done, and not dangerously much else. But if the IDE is complete 
enough for this beginner to work in, isn't it likely to be a reasonable 
place for someone to work who knows more, too?

Sorry, I'm rambling.

Charles Hartman