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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

#81

Post by bxlcarson »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #49
mstolpm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume you are not working in education? Of course, PyCharm has great features and you don't need to use all of them when working with the IDE on your own as a novice coder. But as a teacher, you have a completely different problem: You need a really simple, easy to explain environment - no fuss, no unnecessary complexity. Students /will/ explore unused features on their own and get lost or mess up. There is simp…

> I'd assume you are not working in education? Not right now, but I did. > But as a teacher, you have a completely different problem: You need a really simple, easy to explain environment - no fuss, no unnecessary complexity. Just tell them to ignore that complexity and only press this and this. When I was a kid we were taught to code (simple games in C/WinAPI and C++/MFC) in Visual Studio 6 Enterprise Edition on Win…

I'm surprised that you find Vim unintuitive elsewhere and talk about "just" creating a project in VS.

VS projects in the IDE are one of the most convoluted development ways I've ever seen.

Students won't learn anything except developing Stockholm Syndrom for a bloated proprietary environment.

If it must be Windows, I'd rather teach cl.exe and Makefiles or adapted .vsproj files with msbuild.

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

#82

Post by F00Fbug »

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…

> Not really

No, really! Sorry, but I've run hundreds of students through this course and that's my actual experience. I love PyCharm. It's a great tool. It's not what beginner programmers need to learn the fundamentals of programming.

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

#83

Post by mrweasel »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #40

Thonny is very cool and also a proof a Tkinter GUI doesn't have to be ugly and can actually be beautiful. I hope it's going to be developed actively and becomes smarter and smarter (but not bloated).

That's Tkinter? I didn't even realise it. It looks perfectly ... normal.

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

#84

Post by aivarannamaa »

nyellin wrote: post #37

I would love to see someone change the tiny debugger icons for actions like "pause" and "next step" to giant, obvious, text only buttons with a clear and colorful call to action. They're the most important buttons on the IDE for beginners and they're the least obvious. Also, make breakpoints discoverable if you don't know that they're possible.

Right, pull request or https://github.com/thonny/thonny/issues/new

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

#85

Post by aivarannamaa »

protonfish wrote: post #26
jjice wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of mid-level editors out there. Sounds like Notepad++ and Sublime Text are up you alley. Also, it depends what you mean by bloated, but VS Code can be stripped down to work just like the two I listed above. Language servers aren't required by any means. If you're looking for sub 50MB ram usage, then stick to the two above and search for "Sublime Text alternative" and I'm sure you'll find more equival…

I've used Notepad++ and Sublime Text and like them a lot, but I could really use something that can run on a Raspberry Pi too. I guess I should have included that. Being able to use a single text editor across platforms would be terrific. I prefer Atom.io over VSCode for simplicity. It's much closer to working the way I want out-of-the-box. There's so much junk I have to disable in VSCode to get it where I like.

Geany is cross-platform and runs on RPi

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

#86

Post by aivarannamaa »

barbs wrote: post #75

Cool, simple app. I can see this being really useful for teaching programming to beginners, although I'm curious where the name "Thonny" comes from? Couldn't find anything on the website, does anyone know?

"thon" is from "Python" and "Thonny" is diminutive of this.

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

#87

Post by newswasboring »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #49
mstolpm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume you are not working in education? Of course, PyCharm has great features and you don't need to use all of them when working with the IDE on your own as a novice coder. But as a teacher, you have a completely different problem: You need a really simple, easy to explain environment - no fuss, no unnecessary complexity. Students /will/ explore unused features on their own and get lost or mess up. There is simp…

> I'd assume you are not working in education? Not right now, but I did. > But as a teacher, you have a completely different problem: You need a really simple, easy to explain environment - no fuss, no unnecessary complexity. Just tell them to ignore that complexity and only press this and this. When I was a kid we were taught to code (simple games in C/WinAPI and C++/MFC) in Visual Studio 6 Enterprise Edition on Win…

>Just tell them to ignore that complexity and only press this and this.

You have used 3 "just do this" kind of statements in this comment. I would not like to be in your class. Students should be encouraged to explore, and its a teacher's responsibility to create an environment where its fun and valuable and not frustrating. This is why newtonian mechanics is taught before quantum and quantum mechanics before quantum field theory. Once a person is familiar with one abstraction you drill down. I know all this is hard, but if it was easy everyone will just teach themselves. The whole point of having a teacher is someone who can setup a protective bubble around you when learning.

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

#88

Post by newswasboring »

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!

It reminds me of the MATLAB IDE, early versions. The matlab IDE is still pretty simple, but it used to simpler.

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

#89

Post by blackcats »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #73
nocman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> it is entirely unfair to describe it as That's why I wrote "To me Vim seems...". Beyond the fact it's impossible to start using it right away without instruction, everything else is subjective and context-dependent. > My experience is that the time I spent learning it was well worth the investment. How? I tried. But I still can't see how its key shortctus are better than the common ones (i.e. how Esc,Shift+G (yes,…

Vim lets you jump through text. Try G for bottom, gg for top, $ for end of line, 5j to jump 5 lines, 0 for start of line, w to jump word, b backwards etc. Once you know the shortcuts it’s very comfy and you can use them in any modern IDE like JetBrains and the terminal. Having one workflow everywhere (term, ssh, IDE) does it for me

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

#90

Post by skocznymroczny »

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…

I recommend people starting with programming to try https://codewith.mu/ . It's a Python IDE that's very simple, it doesn't even use menus, just few big buttons so that it's not distracting the users with multiple options.
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