I teach an introductory programming course to medical students (and a few doctors).
I would look at Sublime Text 2 if one Windows/ Mac. Has a 'nag' screen to remind you to buy, but feels simple enough when you start it. M On Wed, 2 Mar 2016 19:50 Ben Finney, <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > Lisa Hasler Waters <lwat...@flinthill.org> writes: > > > Ben, in terms of time for learning curve, I suppose we do have some > > limitations as we are up against school schedules. However, if it is > > something I could learn in a reasonable time that I could then more > > quickly walk my students through then I'd be up for the challenge! > > In that case, my recommendation is to learn a good programmer's editor, > and let your students gain exposure to that. > > Emacs and Vim are the unchallenged masters here; community-owned, > free-software, cross-platform, mature and highly flexible with support > for a huge range of editing tasks. Learning either of those will reward > the student with a tool they can use broadly throughout whatever > computing career they choose. > > They aren't a small investment, though. That “mature” comes at the cost > of an entire ecosystem that evolved in decades past; concepts and > commands are idiosynratic in each of them. It is highly profitable for > any programmer to learn at least one of Emacs or Vim to competence, but > it may be too much to confront a middle-school student in limited class > time. Maybe let the class know they exist, at least. > > Short of those, I'd still recommend a community-owned, free-software, > highly flexible programmer's editor. If you're on GNU+Linux, use the > Kate or GEdit editors; they integrate very nicely with the default > desktop environment and are well-maintained broadly applicable text > editors. GEdit in particular has good Python support. > > I would recommend staying away from any language-specific IDE. Teaching > its idiosyncracies will still be a large time investment, but will not > be worth it IMO because the tool is so limited in scope. Better to teach > a powerfuly general-purpose programmer's editor, and use the operating > system's facilities for managing files and processes. > > -- > \ “Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it | > `\ has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has | > _o__) been playful, rebellious, and immature.” —Tom Robbins | > Ben Finney > > _______________________________________________ > Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org > To unsubscribe or change subscription options: > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor > _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor