[Pdxpw-staff] install instructions for Sublime Text 2

[Emily Strickland]

Responses below inline.

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 9:41 AM, Kevin Turner <keturn at keturn.net> wrote:

>   On Thu, Jul 12, 2012, at 11:01 PM, Emily Strickland wrote:
>
>  Is there any real reason we need package control, linter, or
> sublimecodeintel? i usually don't use these things in ST2 and find them
> annoying at best. as for spaces instead of tabs, it'd be nice, but i don't
> see it being a huge deal, either.
>
>
>  I think speeding up the feedback loop between when an error is made and
> when it is discovered is quite helpful, and a linting tool can do that for
> Name and Syntax errors (as long as it doesn't train you to ignore it by
> giving you too much crap about pep8 whitespace).  A tool like CodeIntel can
> extend the types of errors caught to things like Attribute errors and
> signature mismatches, while at the same time providing code completion to
> reduce the number of keystrokes required and the amount one has to flip
> back to the documentation.
>
>  So while I don't think they're *absolutely* necessary, I do consider such
> features highly desirable, and I think students should have them if we make
> it easy enough.
>

Personally I'd rather they see the errors from Python itself at the command
line. This makes both Python AND the text editor seem less mysterious to a
beginner, as accuracy becomes accountable to the interpreter, and the text
editor remains simply a text editor. I can flex on this, but it's more
setup, and if you and I find it sort of annoying to set up, then beginners
are likely to. This also feels like imposing a personal preference.

In my mind, the only reason we're not using, say, Notepad, is that we want
a very consistent cross-platform experience.


>  As far as spaces go ... well, Sublime will *probably* autodetect and do
> the right thing for the sample projects we have them download.  But Jessica
> did drill in "indent is four tabs" in a very explicit way in her
> instruction, and "your editor does not insert tabs" was deemed important
> enough to get a line item on the Friday evening check-off.  (That's totally
> an appeal-to-authority argument, but I can ask 'em what the motivation for
> that was.)
>

I think the Boston workshop was geared towards users with marginally more
experience. How much experience we expect and require is a decision I think
we've all made implicitly -- and perhaps have made differently.
Spaces-v-tabs is ultimately a community issue, as far as Python goes.
What's our goal here? To introduce novices to programming? Or introduce
techies to Python (as a culture, a way of programming, a way of approaching
problems, etc)? I find both goals compelling, but we only have time and
resources for one.

_______________________________________________
> Pdxpw-staff mailing list
> Pdxpw-staff at lists.openhatch.org
> http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxpw-staff
>
>


-- 
Emily Strickland
emily at zubon.org
706-363-0950
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openhatch.org/pipermail/pdxpw-staff/attachments/20120713/66196411/attachment.html>