> Thank you, Doug! > > Is there any sort of design documentation around IDLE? Because that > might be a great place to start. Perhaps there are a few simple things > we can tweak that will make the shell more shell-like, including key > bindings and more color schemes (a suggestion someone else made that I > love). I'd love to see more people talking about IDLE in a positive > way. > > Katie
You're welcome! And to keep the ball rolling on IDLE design, I'll admit that I have been working on an IDLE-inspired IDE. Here is a screenshot: http://calicoproject.org/Image:CalicoWindow.gif (Calico isn't completely compatible with regular, old Python, as the goals of the system are a little different than IDLE's. For example, Calico supports a number of other languages in the Shell, including Scheme, Basic, Logo, and allows the languages to interoperate.) I mention this only because we have wrestled with the question: what would be better than IDLE?, and this is what we came up with so far. It has tabs, and a single window; It doesn't run Python in a separate process; color syntax highlighting; some support for tab-completion. But we believe in the IDLE Philosophy... our version: keep it simple, but allow it to "scale-up pedagogically". (But we do have built-in chat, and many other education-only features, so it isn't as simple as IDLE). -Doug > On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 8:35 AM, Douglas S. Blank > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hello everyone! >> >> As someone who cares deeply both about open source software and getting >> more diverse groups of people into computing, I appreciate the details >> of >> unfolding story. First, I think that we call all agree on a few points: >> >> * all software can be made better >> * open source software is put together by volunteers >> * there aren't enough female voices in this community >> * diversity is a good thing---it allows us to see issues from other >> perspectives >> * we all want a good IDE for Python >> >> If I can jump in, I'd like to suggest that we all now work on a way >> forward. >> >> 1. Are IDLE sources on github? That would make it easy to fork and fix. >> 2. Perhaps IDLE could use a steering committee, composed of people from >> all walks of life >> 3. Perhaps IDLE will not satisfy all these groups of users. What then? >> Options? Let 1000 IDLE's bloom? >> 4. Is the design of IDLE correct? Or is a reboot in order? >> >> I very much appreciate everyone's honest discussion so far, and hope >> that >> we can work out the issues---a similar situation occurred at PyCon >> (perhaps not ironically) [1], but I hope that we can work out the >> problems >> in a constructive way here. >> >> Thanks! >> >> -Doug >> >> [1] - >> http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/21/breaking-adria-richards-fired-by-sendgrid-for-outting-developers-on-twitter/ >> >> -- >> Douglas S. Blank >> Associate Professor, Computer Science, Bryn Mawr College >> http://cs.brynmawr.edu/~dblank (610)526-6501 >> > _______________________________________________ > IDLE-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/idle-dev > _______________________________________________ IDLE-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/idle-dev
