ACCU :: Thonny: Python IDE for Beginners https://members.accu.org/index.php/articles/2418 Professionalism in Programming en-us Administrator hourly 1 http://backend.userland.com/rss
Programming Topics + CVu Journal Vol 29, #4 - September 2017
Browse in : All > Topics > Programming
All > Journals > CVu > 294
Any of these categories - All of these categories

Note: when you create a new publication type, the articles module will automatically use the templates user-display-[publicationtype].xt and user-summary-[publicationtype].xt. If those templates do not exist when you try to preview or display a new article, you'll get this warning :-) Please place your own templates in themes/yourtheme/modules/articles . The templates will get the extension .xt there.

Title: Thonny: Python IDE for Beginners

Author: Bob Schmidt

Date: 08 September 2017 16:43:12 +01:00 or Fri, 08 September 2017 16:43:12 +01:00

Summary: Silas S. Brown introduces a new Python IDE.

Body: 

Those of us following (or just occasionally checking) the Raspberry Pi blog might be aware of the Raspberry Pi foundation’s recent approval of Thonny (http://thonny.org) as a Python 3 IDE for beginners, and for good reason. Not only is it a simple all-inclusive setup for Python, a syntax-highlighting editor (with library-method completion) and the Pip package manager (with a GUI front-end); it also includes a variable inspector, ‘step over’ and ‘step into’ debugging, and a depiction of how expressions are evaluated and which scope a variable applies to. I don’t expect advanced programmers to need such things in Python, but I expect they can indeed be useful to beginners, especially young ones, who will also benefit from the philosophy of keeping a simple initial interface (I know how bewildering it can feel to start an IDE that demonstrates all its functions up-front, as if you’ve just walked up to an aeroplane’s cockpit and don’t know where to start). I’m glad to see Thonny provided by default on the Raspberry Pi, and it’s also an easy install on Windows, Mac (including some older OS X versions) and GNU/Linux (a downloader/installer shell script is provided that’s supposed to work on any distribution).

It should be noted that Thonny is for Python 3 only; Python 2 is not supported. A significant number of older Python texts assume Python 2, and the version difference can confuse beginners (in hindsight it might have been better if they’d called the new version Python Plus or something). But if that’s not an issue, I’d recommend Thonny for beginners any day.

Notes: 

More fields may be available via dynamicdata ..