[Tutor] Recommendations for best tool to write/run Python

[Ben Finney]

Lisa Hasler Waters <lwaters at flinthill.org> writes:

> Ben, in terms of time for learning curve, I suppose we do have some
> limitations as we are up against school schedules. However, if it is
> something I could learn in a reasonable time that I could then more
> quickly walk my students through then I'd be up for the challenge!

In that case, my recommendation is to learn a good programmer's editor,
and let your students gain exposure to that.

Emacs and Vim are the unchallenged masters here; community-owned,
free-software, cross-platform, mature and highly flexible with support
for a huge range of editing tasks. Learning either of those will reward
the student with a tool they can use broadly throughout whatever
computing career they choose.

They aren't a small investment, though. That “mature” comes at the cost
of an entire ecosystem that evolved in decades past; concepts and
commands are idiosynratic in each of them. It is highly profitable for
any programmer to learn at least one of Emacs or Vim to competence, but
it may be too much to confront a middle-school student in limited class
time. Maybe let the class know they exist, at least.

Short of those, I'd still recommend a community-owned, free-software,
highly flexible programmer's editor. If you're on GNU+Linux, use the
Kate or GEdit editors; they integrate very nicely with the default
desktop environment and are well-maintained broadly applicable text
editors. GEdit in particular has good Python support.

I would recommend staying away from any language-specific IDE. Teaching
its idiosyncracies will still be a large time investment, but will not
be worth it IMO because the tool is so limited in scope. Better to teach
a powerfuly general-purpose programmer's editor, and use the operating
system's facilities for managing files and processes.

-- 
 \        “Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it |
  `\     has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has |
_o__)            been playful, rebellious, and immature.” —Tom Robbins |
Ben Finney