4.3.4 Integrated Development Environment

There must be a simple, ideally graphical IDE...

There were some problems with the IDE used (IDLEfork). The client-server modification discussed in Section 2.3.2 was perhaps the most worrying, but several small problems were encountered during the trial:

Files Python writes for which a full path is not specified are saved in /tmp until the program is saved (from then on the paths are considered as relative to the program file). This is generally not the expected behaviour (which should probably be to save to the user's home directory or the directory from which IDELfork was run).
If a program was saved without a .py extension (which was a common error, in spite of its importance being emphasised) syntax highlighting is stopped (although code written before the save remains highlighted). This is strange. The editor should stop highlighting completely and in an educational context it would be useful for it to point out that you are no longer writing a Python program.
IDLEfork is still quite unstable. On several occasions the editor stopped responding to requests to run programs. The solution was to exit IDLEfork altogether. The cause of this was never determined.

However, IDLEfork is in active development and all these problems have been discussed on the mailing list and solutions suggested.

In spite of these problems the environment provided by IDLEfork was at least satisfactory. Syntax highlighting was particularly useful, and the editor has several useful advanced features such as commenting out regions that some students found on their own.