On Fri, 26 Feb 2021 at 09:07, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > > On Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 11:41:56AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > > Mike Miller writes: > > > > > "sys-admin" is a bit of an overstatement in my phrasing. The core > > > is that you need to understand how a PATH works and be able to run > > > pip and cd into folders and perhaps run rm/del, etc. Basic > > > command-line skills? > > > > That's what I would mean by basic sys-admin skills. And *surprise!* > > my students don't have them, and don't need them ... until they start > > using Python. > > Is it *only* Python though? Wouldn't that be necessary if they were > learning Perl, Java, C, Ruby etc?
It is possible to teach students to do most things in Python without using the command line. For example you can tell them all to install anaconda and then use spyder as their editor. Or you can get them to install and use vscode or pycharm or some other IDE with built in virtualenv and git integration etc. Where Python is awkward is at the point where you actually *want* to teach students to use the command line. The problem is that Python is not set up for command line use out of the box in a consistent way across different platforms. It would be nice to say: now open a terminal, type "python", and hit the enter key and you'll see the Python prompt >>> but it's just not that simple so the instructions end up being like: """ It might be possible to run python from the terminal by typing "python". However that might not work or it might run the wrong version/installation of Python. It might be that you haven't added Python to your PATH environment variable or maybe you have depending on which boxes you ticked when installing. Possibly you need to change your PATH environment variable or possibly you should run Python as "python3" or "py" instead but I have no way of saying without knowing what OS you are on, where you installed Python from, what options you selected in the installer, whether you have any other Python installations etc. If you are on Windows and you get "permission denied" then that's possibly because the MS-provided python.exe stub is on your PATH so you first need to disable that in "app execution aliases". Possibly you can't run Python from the normal terminal but you can open a special terminal for Python that does have the PATH set up such as the Anaconda Prompt. Okay next lesson is how to use "pip" which is really easy: just type "pip install X" but maybe you should actually type "pip3" or "python -m pip" or "python3 -m pip" or "py -m pip" or actually you if you installed Anaconda you might need to use "conda install X". """ When someone learns to use the command line for the first time it's really quite helpful if you can tell them exactly what commands to type. Knowing how to configure PATH and understanding what it does and understanding about OS differences etc is potentially useful in the long run but is a major distraction at the beginning. There have been efforts to improve the situation but in some ways they make it worse. For example the py launcher supposedly fixes some of these problems on Windows but the fact that there is no analogue of it on any non-Windows platform means that any instructions involving it immediately need to split according to OS. Likewise the new python.exe stub that ships with Windows is supposed to fix the Python PATH problem but it actually *prevents* python from working in the terminal if you have installed Python some other way (even if you have added it to PATH): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56974927/permission-denied-trying-to-run-python-on-windows-10 The problems aren't only on Windows because you also have "python" vs "python3" on OSX, Linux etc. On OSX you can also have conflicts between the system Python and any user installed Python. On OSX some installers set up the PATH for you by automagically editing .bash_profile which can be helpful but can also be confusing. After some time people don't actually know how to run the different versions of Python that they installed through homebrew, from python.org or from Anaconda etc and their .bash_profile is a mess. The question of exactly what you should type to run python, pip, etc applies on Linux although I find it less problematic just because Linux users typically know how to use the terminal already. For me as a user of Python I don't usually notice these problems because I use some sort of virtual environment for everything so I can always type "python" or "pip" and there are no conflicts between different installations. When a student can't even get "python" to work in the terminal though it's too much to ask them to start setting up virtual environments. -- Oscar _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/ZNMWRFR7PR7AISBUPBSE32WSNYZFUXCF/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
