Python Development Environments? 87
baxissimo asks: "I've played around with
Python a bit, and as a scripting language I quite like it. So I sat down the other day to see if I could use it to make a modest OpenGL/GUI application on Windows. The short story is I gave up. I couldn't get the
Python IDE I had to run--but that didn't stop me. At first I just shrugged my shoulders and said to myself 'Ah, who needs it? I've got emacs,' and then proceeded to waste a few hours trying to cobble together an app that would run before it dawned on me that Python without a decent IDE is definitely not easier to use than C++ with
an IDE. So is anyone out there actually using Python to make serious apps? What tools are you using?"
"I've heard the
wxPython bindings are nice for the GUI bits, so I downloaded those, and pyOpenGL, and
numPy, and
PIL,
etc. The only recommendation I really saw anywhere for an IDE was for boaConstructor, so I got that. Unfortunately it only spit out a useless error messages on startup and died. What I'd really like to start doing is creating C++/Python hybrids, but given that I was unable to successfully debug a pure Python app, I'm wondering what it's going to be like when my bugs might be in either language. How do people deal with this? What tools help you get the job done? If there's nothing free that works, are there any commercial IDE's worth the money?"
boaConstructor Rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, the wx toolkit and boaConstructor are _very_ powerful. Have you sent your 'meaningless error message' to anyone on the boaConstructor lists to get feedback? I'm pretty sure the error means something to someone - heck, even _I_ might know what the problem is.
Honestly, and I'm not trying to be a troll here, how do you get anything done as a developer if you give up every time you get an error message? I'm not saying that you should have to debug everyone else's code as a part of day-to-day work, but if you just give up on something (boaConstructor) without Googling for an answer or consulting others or just digging in, then that doesn't bode well for what you'll do when you encounter a bug of your own creation. boaConstructor is used by a lot of people, and is under active development - if everyone got the 'meaningless error message' you got when they installed it, then either no one would use it, or it would already of been fixed. The most likely causes for your problem are:
A) You checked out a bad build from CVS (Get another)
B) You don't have the prerequisites installed correctly, or you installed boaConstructor incorrectly
C) Your Path is messed up (this will affect any/all dev projects - if a library or file cant be found, errors will happen)
D) Invalid permissions
E) Version conflicts (You could be on an old redhat box with Python 1.5.2, and boaConstructor needs a newer version, for example).
Instead of bothering slashdot with this issue, why didn't you post to the python list and/or the boaConstructor list? I'm sure that with the proper info people will be able to solve your problem.