On 11/17/18 10:38 AM, Avi Gross wrote: > I was wondering if I was the only one who felt the urge to apply a tad of > humor and suppressed most of the thoughts about idol/IDLE worship and other > puns so I am glad to see Steve do just a little of the same. > > It seems that despite how portable Python is touted to be, quite a few people > report problems in getting the basics working when installing. And if you > can't get started, that is obviously a barrier. My suggestion earlier was > based on the fact that IDLE is an add-on and they should first check if > Python itself works. Any text editor can be used that just produces plain > text and scripts can be run in other ways. > > But I have a thought. An old an often effective method to solve a problem is > to search in the source code. Yes, you did not write IDLE. > > I am still not clear on how IDLE aborts on startup but I recall that IDLE > may be written in Python with source code available.
actually, one of the "surprising" ways IDLE can fail for people is specifically because it is written in Python itself: if they have a Python file in the directory they are starting it from that duplicates the name of an important file in IDLE - if the import statement is encountered in IDLE and that import can be satisfied by the local file it picks that one first, and then IDLE breaks... anyway, one of the common things people say to get around this is to just dump IDLE. this sounds harsh: Python strives to supply a usable beginner environment and then it doesn't work, and we say "so don't use it"? well, it doesn't bother me to say that... there are tons of IDE-type environments for Python, ones that call themselves editors but have "run script inside the editor" behavior and ones that are full IDE. By all means, try the information on the internet on getting IDLE working, but it's not worth spending a *ton* of time on it, IDLE is not Python, it's just a helpful tool, and if a tool doesn't work but another one will, throw away the broken one. Here are some thoughts: https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEditors https://wiki.python.org/moin/IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments those are user-edited pages, if anyone has more favorites that are not listed there, please feel free to volunteer to add more. Between several systems I have the following things that let me edit and run Python code: IDLE (yup, works for me) Eric Atom (with additional Python configuration for nicer env) Eclipse (with Python environment pydev) PyCharm (with additional Python configuration for nicer env) SublimeText (with additional Python configuration for nicer env) Visual Studio Code (with additional Python configuration for nicer env) vim some often favored Windows tools don't appear on this list, like Code::Blocks, because I'm not principally a Windows user. I don't use all of those: some not at all, some frequently, some occasionally. They all work fine. All are free except SublimeText; PyCharm comes in both free community and non-free other editions. Some are big and heavy (I don't recommend Eclipse for the faint of heart), some are not. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor