Thursday, June 5, 2008

Some Backstory on IDLE Python IDE

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/idle-dev/2008-June/thread.html

Re: [Idle-dev] Fix for long delays

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 9:07 AM, Bruce Sherwood <Bruce_Sherwood@*.edu> wrote:
> Dave Scherer suggested that I join this discussion, as I represent a
> constituency of literally thousands of college students who use IDLE in

...

> There are very good reasons to want novice programmers who are
> writing computational physics programs to be writing and running full
> programs at all times, not to be working at the statement level in the
> interactive shell. Interacting in the shell can of course be very useful for
> expert programmers, but this kind of interaction with a programming language
> weakens for our students the concept that a program is a complete sequence
> of operations, performed sequentially. It may sound strange, but this is not
> a trivial concept to many newcomers.

...

Remember? Remember learning that concept? I vaguely do. Wow.

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