[Python-Dev] [Idle-dev] Removing IDLE from the standard library (original) (raw)

Reid Kleckner reid.kleckner at gmail.com
Mon Jul 12 17:36:16 CEST 2010

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 9:20 AM, Kurt B. Kaiser <kbk at shore.net> wrote:

Also, the current right click edit action on Windows is to only open an edit window; no shell.  And it uses the subprocess!  So, some of the comments on this thread are not up to date.

The reason that bug languished for two years was because first, it was a bit of a hack, and second, Windows was problematic in that it reused sockets and often left zombie subprocesses behind which couldn't be killed except with the task manager.  This causes real problems with students - they lose confidence in the tool. Scherer and Weeble put together a patch using ephemeral ports which nailed the problem, and I checked it in right away and forward/backported it.

That's great news! I TAed a freshman Python class this January, and Windows users ran into this problem a lot. Mostly when hitting 'x' in the upper right. Fortunately, some quick searching led me to the Python tracker where I found the workaround. :)

(Somwhat off-topic): Another pain point students had was accidentally shadowing stdlib modules, like random. Renaming the file didn't solve the problem either, because it left behind .pycs, which I had to help them delete.

Overall, I would say that IDLE worked very well in that situation, so while it does have its quirks, it worked very well for us. Imagine trying to get students started with Eclipse or NetBeans. Yuck!

Reid

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