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

Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin cben at users.sf.net
Tue Jul 13 10:11:07 CEST 2010

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 18:20, Tal Einat <taleinat at gmail.com> wrote:

The (hopefully) compelling arguments were others, such as the sentence following the one you quoted:

"I think that in its current state, IDLE may still be helpful for learning Python, but it is more likely to drive away users who run into its various quirks and problems." Having taught a few Python courses myself, I must say that while not perfect [I had to apologize for some IDLE issues, which shamed me into filing bugs/patches for some of them], it is better for interactive use than most other IDEs! That's IMHO the #1 is the real reason that makes it ideal for teaching, not the fact that it's bundled with Python. I wouldn't mind telling people "install Python and X" instead of "install Python", but very few Python environments do multiline history correctly :-(.

The only one I know that beats IDLE is Dreampie (designed by Noam Raphael, a long time IDLE contributor). However, without an editor and F5 it's not a winner for teaching.

For the record, I'm -42 on removing IDLE from the distribution (unless you have a better replacement?), but +1 on widening commit access and setting up one obvious way for users to try bleeding-edge IDLE. -0 on extracting it from the stdlib (it's one way to implement the above, not sure if best way).

But here's a thought: why not make IDLE an early adopter of Mercurial? It seems to me that could ease a lot of the issues:

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