Choosing an IronPython editor for teaching

By Michael Foord -
As outlined in IronPython in Action Goes to College, Tony Andrew Meyer is teaching a programming course and using IronPython in Action as course material. Part of his preparation is deciding which IDE to use in the course - a choice that is not entirely straightforward for IronPython.

Tony has done a long and thorough blog entry going through all the possibilities. The editors he looks at are: Notepad++, IronPython Studio, SharpDevelop 3.0, SharpDevelop 3.1b1, Wing IDE 101, Davy's IronPython Editor, Visual Studio under experimental hive and Komodo Edit.
The Northtec D520 “Programming” course is changing to IronPython (from Visual Basic) this year, so I have to figure out what editor/IDE the students should use. In some ways, Visual Studio would be ideal, since they need to get exposed to that during the course (and it’s an excellent IDE, with a really great form designer), but since there isn’t any real IronPython support in Visual Studio (hopefully coming in 2010), it’s not really a viable option. Instead, they’ll start with a simpler editor, and then briefly learn how to use Visual Studio’s form designer and subclass the forms in IronPython (as described in IronPython in Action).

The requirements here are a bit different than when selecting an editor/IDE for actual development work. Firstly, it needs to be free (at least for educational use), and it needs to be reasonably simple to use the basic functionality (since these are first-year students). Code-completion isn’t necessary (on the one hand, it helps them out while they are learning – on the other, they rely a little too much on it), nor is a built-in debugger, or support for complex projects.

I considered seven different editors/IDEs...

...

Conclusion
Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear winner. My recommendation will be that the students spend the first half of the course using a text editor: if they are comfortable continuing to use Notepad++, then that makes the most sense. If they are willing to try a new tool, then I would recommend Komodo Edit (or DIE if they want something that just works without having to do any additional configuration). When the time comes to start learning how to use a graphical form designer, then I would recommend that they install the Visual Studio SDK and add IronPython support under the “Experimental Hive”, although they’ll also learn how to use standard Visual Studio and subclass C#/Visual Basic forms in IronPython. It seems like they could then continue to use the “Experimental Hive” for the rest of the semester (even for Console projects), although they would know how to fall back to the previous tools if necessary.
Tony didn't try out Eclipse with PyDev (which may have added IronPython support after he started the exercise or it may be that using IronPython 2.6 isn't an option for Tony). It would be really nice if MonoDevelop had IronPython support so that it was a viable possibility.

An email regarding MonoDevelop was just posted to the IronPython Mailing List:
MonoDevelop is the IDE of choice for .NET languages on Linux. But currently there's no IronPython support for it. There are a couple starting points available in the svn sources, but someone would need to take a fresh look at it and write a new IronPython binding.

Anyway, if there's any initiative to increase IronPython use on non-Windows platforms, this might be one way to help that.

Some references--









































Comments









  1. Tony Meyer7/18/2009 5:46 am
    Thanks for the link!

    FWIW, today, I gave in and tried Eclipse/PyDev and also NetBeans.  I couldn't get PyDev to work, but NetBeans was actually pretty nice.  My post has a link to the added material.
    ReplyDelete











Post a Comment



















Popular posts from this blog









Extending Abobe Flash Player and AIR with Python and Ruby







By


Michael Foord



-















An intriguing blog entry about an Adobe experimental project. It is a C/C++ cross- compiler for the flash player and AIR. This means that you can (will be able to?) cross-compile the Python / Ruby/ lots of other language runtimes and then run them in Flash. The blog entry contrasts this approach to the DLR which requires the re-implementation of dynamic languages - hence IronPython and IronRuby. The project is already beyond proof-of concept, they even have Quake III cross-compiled and running in Flash. Extending Adobe Flash Player and AIR with C/C++ Cross-Compiler Quake 3 has already been ported to managed code , but this is even more impressive. Whether the Python interpreter can be cross-compiled to run on top of another runtime (with completely different basic types), without changing the language semantics at all, has yet to be proved - but it is a very interesting project. (It also means that Python/Ruby will possibly be enabled only by additional optional downloads - but don'








Read more










Should Python Projects Support IronPython and Jython?







By


Michael Foord



-















The maintainers of the Spring Framework for Python ( Spring Python ) wonder how much of a priority it is to have compatibility with platforms other than CPython. In other words, should they support IronPython and Jython - and if so what should they do about their C extension dependencies? This question sparks a good discussion and is relevant to many other Python projects and applications: Need for supporting IronPython, Jython?  " One of the topics on my mind recently, as we consider refactoring the core container, is how we ensure that when we introduce internal dependencies, such as possibly the Amara libraries for XML processing, what secondary constraints we might be introducing. " " For example, Amara represents a very pythonic and therefore simple to read and use approach to developing XML processing, such as our very own XML application configuration parsers. So from that perspective, things are very attractive. But then you ask the question, "can I run this








Read more










Further Adventures of the Debugger







By


Michael Foord



-















Harry Pierson (Microsoft IronPython PM) has been experimenting with writing an IronPython debugger ( ipydbg ) on top of the .NET MDbg APIs. When we last left him , he had implemented Just My Code (JMC) support allowing you to step into IronPython code. Since then he has made a lot of progress including a colourful REPL (interactive console) and solving some difficult problems around getting to real values behind boxed IronPython variables (needed for showing local variables). He has blogged extensively on what he has been up to (more recent posts last): Showing Source Code Colorful Console IronPython ConsoleColorMgr  (the colorful console code pulled out into a separate IronPython module) A Little Hack...err...Cleanup Getting Local Variables Displaying Values Command Routing Getting Arguments REPL Console A lot of functionality is now present. In the command routing entry Harry outlines the seven commands supported by the debugger so far: Continue, Quit, Show Stack Trace, Show Locals, 








Read more