Re: [Visualpython-users] Idle fixes starting up.

[Bruce S. <Bru...@nc...>]

This is actually very humorous, as you'll see. For the benefit of those 
who may not know about it, I'll comment that Google every year runs a 
program called "Google Summer of Code" (GSoC) in which significant 
open-source projects such as Python nominate students to work on 
projects and Google pays the student. A mentor is assigned to the 
student to give advice and follow progress.

One of this summer's Python projects was proposed by a Brazilian 
student, Guilherme Polo, who had done good work in two previous GSoC 
programs, and the project was accepted by the Python group. Polo 
proposed doing a lot of maintenance and bug fixes on Tk and IDLE. His 
mentor was....me! So yes, I do know about Polo's work, and I'm really 
excited about it.

David Scherer and I had a wish list of IDLE fixes and changes which are 
among the things Polo worked on. To give just one example: There are now 
thousands of students every semester learning about computational 
modeling in introductory university physics classes by writing VPython 
programs (see http://www.matterandinteractions.org). These are novice 
programmers. It is common for them to stare at a non-moving image 
without it occurring to them that the halt could be due to a program 
error. Polo has implemented that the shell window containing the error 
comes forward to be seen, which should make a huge difference.

The GSoC is nearly at an end, and Polo is finishing up his work. The 
presumption is that this will make it into the official IDLE for Python, 
but in the meantime I'll change the temporary VIDLE to be the new 
version. Hurray!

Bruce Sherwood

Scott David Daniels wrote:
> Hey Bruce, did you notice gpolo's flurry of checkins on Idle?
> It might be a good time to see what is still a bug, and what is not.
> 
> A number of year-old and older issues got addressed.
> 
> --Scott David Daniels
> Sco...@Ac...