[Python-Dev] IDLE in the stdlib (original) (raw)

Mark Janssen dreamingforward at gmail.com
Thu Mar 21 22:19:33 CET 2013

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:32 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

On 3/20/2013 12:41 PM, Eli Bendersky wrote:

Personally, I think that IDLE reflects badly on Python in more ways than one. It's badly maintained, quirky and ugly.

Ugly is subjective: by what standard and compared to what?

I might be jumping in late here, but...

The only thing I find "ugly" about it is that it doesn't have a white-on-black color scheme. Look at any hacker console and you won't find a white screen. Otherwise its fine. Fixing that issue is simple, I can upload my color scheme if anyone wants.

It serves a very narrow set of uses,

IDLE serves a very important "narrow use" purpose -- helping the plethora of beginning programmers. Anyone who wants to criticize it can slap themselves. Python attracts many beginners, and if you don't remember, installing a separate "fancy" editor was never on the priority list until several years later. Give me a break.

> and does it badly.

Come on. It gets even a strong programmer 80% of the way to what he/she needs.

And in any case, I think the interpreter environment is the place to keep the programmer's focus. That is the arena where the community has been and it's what has kept programming in Python fun. And although this goes against decades(?) of programming history, the future of programming, is not in the editor. The "editor-centric paradigm" has not created a community of re-usable code, despite all the promises.

I'll argue that the interpreter environment will be the future and the editor will be relegated to a simple memory-saving device.

Mark Tacoma, Washington -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20130321/32c614f7/attachment.html>

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