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Thonny: A hassle-free Python micro-IDE

thonny.org

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Re: Thonny: A hassle-free Python micro-IDE

#61

Post by tasty_freeze »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #42
F00Fbug wrote: post #34

I recommend this to my students frequently. I teach an intro to programming class to college students who have no experience. Inevitably, some try to use PyCharm and they just get lost in it! I tell them it's like learning to drive in an 18 wheeler with a manual transmission. Thonny is very much the Toyota Corolla of IDEs and it's perfect for beginners. The debugger and variable pane really help beginners figure out…

> Inevitably, some try to use PyCharm and they just get lost in it! I tell them it's like learning to drive in an 18 wheeler with a manual transmission. Not really. You don't have to use all its features, they are neither necessary nor intrusive. E.g. I hardly know, let alone use more than 10% of its functionality. The only reasons I use it are very smart code completion, refactoring (rename variable/class/function/w…

Imagine telling the students to use vim if they have never used it before. In theory, one only needs to know a few things to edit:

- type vi to start editing

- there are two modes: 'i' to start insert mode, to leave it for normal mode

- in insert mode, what you type is entered as you type

- in normal mode, use the cursor keys to move around

- in normal mode, type 'x' to delete the character under the cursor

- type :wq to save and quit

What are the odds a vim-virgin could complete a programming assignment without getting tripped up, despite the explicit directions to use just the features above?

Re: Thonny: A hassle-free Python micro-IDE

#62

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

kangalioo wrote: post #60
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #39

I'm probably nostalgic, but the GUI looks so refreshing. I think I need more Tk in my interacting-with-guis part of life.

I think it may be the whitespace in the UI. It really gives the thing room to breath

No! Fwiw, there's a bit too much of it, but it's not even close to the offendingly huge margins of some modern UIs (not arguing there's no place for this UI style at all).

The main window on the first shot from the site is about 620px wide and I feel I could write some code not even resizing it. I easily imagine 2 buttons, dropdown and 2 textboxes filling this whole window instead.

Re: Thonny: A hassle-free Python micro-IDE

#63

Post by qwerty456127 »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #61
qwerty456127 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inevitably, some try to use PyCharm and they just get lost in it! I tell them it's like learning to drive in an 18 wheeler with a manual transmission. Not really. You don't have to use all its features, they are neither necessary nor intrusive. E.g. I hardly know, let alone use more than 10% of its functionality. The only reasons I use it are very smart code completion, refactoring (rename variable/class/function/w…

Imagine telling the students to use vim if they have never used it before. In theory, one only needs to know a few things to edit: - type vi to start editing - there are two modes: 'i' to start insert mode, to leave it for normal mode - in insert mode, what you type is entered as you type - in normal mode, use the cursor keys to move around - in normal mode, type 'x' to delete the character under the cursor - type :w…

> Imagine telling the students to use vim

I can hardly imagine that. They would hate me for wasting their time they could use to learn something practical. To me Vim seems a crazy alien technology of particularly questionable usefulness (even for a keyboard-centric user), only suitable for fun and for looking cool. Unlike PyCharm or Visual Studio, Vim doesn't just have unintuitive features available to whoever chooses to invoke those, it is and can only be operated in a completely unintuitive way, impossible to learn without instruction. And I never needed any instruction on how to use, let alone exit PyCharm.

Re: Thonny: A hassle-free Python micro-IDE

#64

Post by qwerty456127 »

protonfish wrote: post #15

Why is everything an IDE? I don't want an integrated development environment - I want a modular one. And as one of those modules, I would love a simple, lightweight code editor. UTF-8 only, auto-indent, a file list column, a good find-in-page feature, and file type dependent syntax highlighting and multi-line comment key. That's all I need. It seems I am always stuck between bloated IDEs (or bloated text editors like…

I would also prefer a good editor (rather than an IDE), if only it had really intelligent context-aware autocompletion and would let me rename variables/classes/etc reliably (without using dumb search-and-replace).

Re: Thonny: A hassle-free Python micro-IDE

#66

Post by Naac »

eitland wrote: post #5
Naac wrote: post #3

The debugger looks neat. Would be nice to have the same micro-IDE for Go, Rust, Ruby, etc. Something like the Jetbrains tools, but open source.

Fun fact: the core of Jetbrains IntelliJ is a very capable real, extensible open source IDE that they've released themselves. I suspect (but I'm not sure) that the rest of their desktop products are built on top of that.

Yes, the community edition set of editors are the only ones I use.

But there are no open source plugins for Go or Rust in top of intellij. So for all intents and purposes the editor is not open source for those languages. As far as I know no one in the community has tried implementing an open source plugin to compete with the proprietary ones.

Re: Thonny: A hassle-free Python micro-IDE

#67

Post by nine_k »

djrobstep wrote: post #38

It's so irritating that good clear visualization and minimal boilerplate is considered "for beginners". These features should be available in every programming environment.

It is friendly to beginners, but of course not limited to beginners.

Thonny just seems to do few things, but do them rather well.

Re: Thonny: A hassle-free Python micro-IDE

#68

Post by jerf »

protonfish wrote: post #25
jerf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be spec'ing either vim or emacs, there.

Sorry, I guess I didn't know I had to include "and without a completely unnecessary non-standard interface that requires a massive learning curve to get started." as a feature.

Well, if you want all the things, you're going to end up at "write your own", it seems. If you can't find yourself a text editor, of all the things programmers love to write to scratch their own itches and which we have coming out of our metaphorical collective ears....

Re: Thonny: A hassle-free Python micro-IDE

#69

Post by nocman »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #63
tasty_freeze wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine telling the students to use vim if they have never used it before. In theory, one only needs to know a few things to edit: - type vi to start editing - there are two modes: 'i' to start insert mode, to leave it for normal mode - in insert mode, what you type is entered as you type - in normal mode, use the cursor keys to move around - in normal mode, type 'x' to delete the character under the cursor - type :w…

> Imagine telling the students to use vim I can hardly imagine that. They would hate me for wasting their time they could use to learn something practical. To me Vim seems a crazy alien technology of particularly questionable usefulness (even for a keyboard-centric user), only suitable for fun and for looking cool. Unlike PyCharm or Visual Studio, Vim doesn't just have unintuitive features available to whoever choose…

> I can hardly imagine that. They would hate me for wasting their time they could use to learn something practical. To me Vim seems a crazy alien technology of particularly questionable usefulness (even for a keyboard-centric user)

I know tons of developers and system administrators that use vim on a daily basis (that includes me). While I agree that I would not necessarily recommend it for a beginning student, it is entirely unfair to describe it as having "particularly questionable usefulness", and "only suitable for fun and for looking cool". I and many others use vim for real work, not for "looking cool".

Yes, the learning curve is high, and it requires investing some time to learn. My experience is that the time I spent learning it was well worth the investment. It's not for everyone, but that doesn't mean that it not for anyone.

Re: Thonny: A hassle-free Python micro-IDE

#70

Post by mattbk1 »

mahathu wrote: post #4

Just by the screenshot, does this remind anyone else of R Studio? I'm a psychology major and working as a "student tutor", which in my case means helping lower year students work with R for statistical analysis. A lot of them are struggling, but for the ones that aren't and show further interest beyond R, I might recommend this IDE after looking into it more!

FWIW, it's rare these days that I need to go "beyond R" for anything. If there were a Python IDE that worked as well as RStudio, I might explore it.
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