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

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri Mar 22 01:27:26 CET 2013

On 3/21/2013 11:21 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 5:26 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

I showed IDLE to my 6-year-old on the Raspberry Pi and I'm convinced it is cool. Gave up on trying to (slowly) install bpython. We were multiplying large numbers and counting to 325,000 in no time. It might not be for me but I'm not going to teach my daughter a large IDE any time soon. This, 1000x this. It was helping out at the Young Coders tutorials that convinced me we need to continue shipping IDLE, or something like it, for use by *people learning to use computers as more than just passive consumers for the first time*. This means running well on Windows and the Raspberry Pi at this point. Keeping IDLE in the core represents a commitment to the use of Python as a teaching language both inside and outside of formal educational settings. We can refactor IDLE to make aspects of it easier to test with the buildbots, especially now that we have unittest.mock in the standard library to mock out some of the UI interaction in the test suite. (I'm happy to help coach the IDLE devs on that if they want to start improving the test suite coverage for the IDLE code)

Thank for for the offer to help. I added you to the IDLE test issue. http://bugs.python.org/issue15392 Improving tests is one of the main things I personally want to do. Roger is expert at tkinter code, so I will focus on other things. I want to work toward IDLE patches following the standard rule of adding at least one test with every patch. A permanent exemption from that rule is not part of the PEP.

I think we should commit to making "start with IDLE" the recommended teaching experience, and then focus on *making that experience awesome*. Once people are already familiar with the language and what it can do for them, they may choose to move on to other tools, or they may decide to stick with IDLE. But deciding on "What is IDLE?" and "Why is it part of the CPython development repo?" is a necessary step to revitalising it and stopping the recurring discussions about taking it out.

If Terry is willing to recast his PEP in that light, I think that would be a wonderful thing to do.

I completely agree ;-). I asked Todd to help with this, and perhaps you can give me some more concrete hints as to what you would like to see where.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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