I've decided to learn Python (especialy stackless) since it looks really interesting but the IDLE IDE that comes with 2.7 is not user friendly, There's a way to intergrate python and VS 2008 but I can't seem to get it to work. any one know anything about this?

I didn't know you could use it with VS. Anyway I would second Eclipse that's what I use and it works well with python.

nevermind Eclipse, I've heard bad things about it, it's fat, clunky and horrible to use, built on the JAVA VM if I remember correctly. Iron python was one I was thinking about but you have to faf about abit to get it to work, and what your talking about won't work with express, the limitations won't let Ironpython work properly. Guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and download that 400mb shell program. https://ironpythonstudio.codeplex.com/
The main version of python I want to learn is Stackless, I read about some cool things about it on EVE online dev blog that just got me interested.
There's two versions of the shell thing, one is intergrated (with VS) and one is isolated which opens a seprate instance for each instance of tools you have.

my ide: between 2 and 6 terminals, text editor, tiling wm. the only ide that looks to be remotely appealing aside from this (in my view) is light table. the reason I prefer to work like this is that it's easy to set up different workspaces for different tasks. at work, I have one terminal doing behind the scenes auto-compilation of various bits and pieces and running my test server. on my game project, i have a series of command-line tools for various tasks, and am increasingly building development tools into the game code itself (map editor, etc). i guess that this reflects that my programming life rarely ever involves tasks that are just about programming. the big weakness is (some kinds of) refactoring, which i likely call on eclipse for. but i'm not happy about it.


anyways i don't know anything about visual studio but now you know how the other half lives. have fun with python, it's a neat language.

Light table looks awesome, is going to be free/opensource?

Preliminarily, we're thinking licenses will be based on a "pay what you can/what you believe it is worth" model for individuals.

I see, sounds awesome, thanks for the info.

I don't really use an IDE for writing python (is it necessary?)

short answer: you need a decent development environment but it doesn't have to be integrated. it depends much more on the size and duration of the project than what language you working in, though.