[Tutor] Regarding "IDLE Subprocess Didn't Make Connection" Error

[Mats Wichmann]

On 11/17/18 10:38 AM, Avi Gross wrote:
> I was wondering if I was the only one who felt the urge to apply a tad of humor and suppressed most of the thoughts about idol/IDLE worship and other puns so I am glad to see Steve do just a little of the same.
> 
> It seems that despite how portable Python is touted to be, quite a few people report problems in getting the basics working when installing. And if you can't get started, that is obviously a barrier. My suggestion earlier was based on the fact that IDLE is an add-on and they should first check if Python itself works. Any text editor can be used that just produces plain text and scripts can be run in other ways.
> 
> But I have a thought. An old an often effective method to solve a problem is to search in the source code. Yes, you did not write IDLE. 
> 
>  I am still not clear on how IDLE aborts on startup but I recall that IDLE may be written in Python with source code available. 

actually, one of the "surprising" ways IDLE can fail for people is
specifically because it is written in Python itself: if they have a
Python file in the directory they are starting it from that duplicates
the name of an important file in IDLE - if the import statement is
encountered in IDLE and that import can be satisfied by the local file
it picks that one first, and then IDLE breaks...

anyway, one of the common things people say to get around this is to
just dump IDLE.  this sounds harsh: Python strives to supply a usable
beginner environment and then it doesn't work, and we say "so don't use
it"?  well, it doesn't bother me to say that... there are tons of
IDE-type environments for Python, ones that call themselves editors but
have "run script inside the editor" behavior and ones that are full IDE.
By all means, try the information on the internet on getting IDLE
working, but it's not worth spending a *ton* of time on it, IDLE is not
Python, it's just a helpful tool, and if a tool doesn't work but another
one will, throw away the broken one.

Here are some thoughts:

https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEditors
https://wiki.python.org/moin/IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments

those are user-edited pages, if anyone has more favorites that are not
listed there, please feel free to volunteer to add more.

Between several systems I have the following things that let me edit and
run Python code:

IDLE (yup, works for me)
Eric
Atom (with additional Python configuration for nicer env)
Eclipse (with Python environment pydev)
PyCharm (with additional Python configuration for nicer env)
SublimeText (with additional Python configuration for nicer env)
Visual Studio Code (with additional Python configuration for nicer env)
vim

some often favored Windows tools don't appear on this list, like
Code::Blocks, because I'm not principally a Windows user.

I don't use all of those: some not at all, some frequently, some
occasionally.  They all work fine.  All are free except SublimeText;
PyCharm comes in both free community and non-free other editions. Some
are big and heavy (I don't recommend Eclipse for the faint of heart),
some are not.