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From: Ashton Fagg <ashton@fagg.id.au>
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:06:33 +1000
Subject: Re: Python education survey
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On 20 December 2011 13:51, Raymond Hettinger
<raymond.hettinger@gmail.com> wrote:
> Students may not be experienced with the command-line and may be
> running Windows, Linux, or Macs. =C2=A0Ideally, the tool or IDE will be
> easy to install and configure (startup directory, path, associated
> with a particular version of Python etc).

I tutor people (usually fellow students) in programming occasionally,
and I've always recommended a simple text editor and a command line
(this correlates with most languages, not just Python). My personal
set up (using Linux) is vim (with line numbers and syntax
highlighting) + shell, no matter which language I'm working with.
However for people I'm tutoring, particularly if they're new to
programming in general and would find vim intimidating, I recommend
gedit (for Linux) or Notepad++ (for Windows), executing/compiling from
the command line.

As long as the text editor has line numbers and syntax highlighting
it's sufficient in my book. I don't like obfuscating what's going on
in the background (i.e. interacting with the Python/C/<insert language
here> interpreter/compiler/whatever) with a fancy IDE. However that is
my personal (strong) opinion.

Hope that helps.

--=20
Ashton Fagg
E-mail: ashton@fagg.id.au
Web: http://www.fagg.id.au/~ashton/

Keep calm and call Batman.