IronPython editor postscript (Eclipse and NetBeans)

By Michael Foord -
Tony Andrew Meyer did a comprehensive blog entry on choosing an IronPython editor for teaching. In it he reviewed 7 IDEs and Python editors for use with IronPython. He's posted an update to this where he tries out NetBeans plus the combination of Eclipse and PyDev.
I earlier tried various editors I was considering using to teach IronPython. One of the glaring omissions was Eclipse/PyDev, which has built-in support and is a very well-known IDE (particularly in the Java community). The main reason that I skipped Eclipse was that when I was searching for an IDE to use professionally about five years ago I tried Eclipse (for Python, C, and C++ development) and I really hated it – the IDE was very slow (especially to launch), it was very Java-centric, and just didn’t suit me at all. I’d briefly tried Eclipse before that as well, with similar results.

Over the last few days, I decided that I was probably being unfair, and since this was a choice for my students rather than for me personally, I really ought to try Eclipse (with the PyDev extensions). I also noticed recently a post about using IronPython with NetBeans – I’d heard of NetBeans before, but only in a Java development context, and since I stay as far away from Java development as I can, I had no experience with NetBeans at all.

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