<story><title>Modernizing Python&apos;s IDLE</title><url>http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/idle.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jamesdutc</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve recently seen a lot of demand in Python corporate training.&lt;p&gt;High-quality corporate training hinges on maximizing student engagement. This typically means having students spend time in class writing programs. (In one four day class, I&amp;#x27;ve had students write &amp;gt;20 programs.)&lt;p&gt;IDLE is a surprisingly good tool for this.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s cross-platform and in the standard library. It postpones questions about which is the best editor&amp;#x2F;IDE. It avoids the tab&amp;#x2F;spaces problems. In fact, it&amp;#x27;s just about the simplest tool for teaching interactive development (i.e., coding with access to a REPL.) (I should note that this style of programming is distinct from how quants and data scientists work: they write more analyses than programs&amp;#x2F;scripts. When doing corporate training for quants and data scientists, Jupyter Notebook is the only way to go.)&lt;p&gt;By the end of the class, most students are pretty tired of using IDLE. It&amp;#x27;s not a very good editor; only barely better than Notepad. As the article&amp;#x27;s screenshots show, it just looks ugly. It&amp;#x27;s not even close in functionality to an IDE or a `vim`&amp;#x2F;`emacs`+plugins. The REPL is extremely clumsy to use in practice (especially compared to `bpython` or `ipython`.) In fact, I would be shocked if anyone actually uses IDLE as part of their regular job.&lt;p&gt;That said, it&amp;#x27;s a great teaching tool, and I&amp;#x27;m glad to see someone putting effort into improving it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Modernizing Python&apos;s IDLE</title><url>http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/idle.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomswartz07</author><text>Gang:&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a relevation that I only, just now, realized.&lt;p&gt;Python is named after the Monty Python gang. This I knew.&lt;p&gt;IDLE is a play off of Eric Idle.
How have I never realized this before?</text></comment>