[Tutor] IDEs

Josep M. Fontana josep.m.fontana at gmail.com
Mon Nov 22 10:13:13 CET 2010


Alan gave me this piece of advice in his response to another message I
sent to the list. Since the topic is a bit different from the one in
the original message, I think it is better to start a different
thread.

> Don;t run your code inside the IDE except for testing. IDEs are
> Development Environments, they are not ideal for executing production
> code. Run your file from the Terminal command prompt directly.

I thought the code was not run inside the IDE but it was run by Python
independently, that is, the IDE just provides an interface.
When I run code from within Eclipse (the IDE I'm starting to use) I
can see a Python process in my process monitor. The process for
Eclipse is consuming very little CPU.

So, what is the advantage of running the file from Terminal? I can see
only disadvantages:

a) it is slower since I have to type $python filename.py (ok, this
takes very little time but clicking a button or typing a key shortcut
to execute the code takes less time)

b) with the terminal I don't get the debugging benefits that an IDE
provides (I must say though that I still haven't really taken
advantage of the benefits that Eclipse provides since the code I'm
writing so far is pretty simple).

JM


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