On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Gregor Lingl <gregor.li...@aon.at> schrieb:
> > Some might prefer a monospaced font like the beautiful "Liberation Mono" > (GNU General Public License) for instance. Using a non monospace font can be > irritating sometimes concerning the indentation. > > I should check that out. Fonts that include big swatches of Unicode (such as Kanji) should be fun as well. Note that Akbar and other non-monospace aren't that bad for left-aligned languages such as Python, FORTRAN etc., as the space characters share the same width, so the block indentations appear as rigidly vertical as New Courier's. > Anyway IDLE is a very good choice for beginners, because it's small (and > thus not distracting) but has everything you need during the first year of > learning how to program. (In my experience it's disadvantageous to use an > editor or an IDE that demands a substantial part of the learning energy and > efforts of the students.) > It's also open source in Tkinter so you can scroll through quickly and get an idea of what GUI-based Python is all about. It's pretty easy to get productive in a hurry with Tk bindings -- which is the chief weakness of IDLE: it makes for a crazy-bad Tk development environment, which is what one might be inspired to do, having used IDLE. That's when one starts learning how to boot Python from a command line. If you're not used to a command line, because you're an eye candy junky, on either MacOS or Windows, then here's a golden opportunity to learn on. Then, after learning to go chdir, mkdir, rmdir and whatever, jump into Python's os and shutils and accomplish the same things -- good reinforcement. Learning to love a command line is a core goal of "beginner mind" trainings. Kirby
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