Comment by albertzeyer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by albertzeyer | Hacker News Reader

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Looks very cool from a first glance!

As it was mentioned in another comment, its hard to find a link to the source code of this, or even to get the information, whether this is open source, and what licence. (Answer: https://github.com/mu-editor/mu/, licence is GPLv3). For some people, this is some of the most important question before they would try out a new app.

Also, one detail which was hard to find, but interesting for me: This is build using PyQt5.

About the MacOSX package: It's about 430 MB. This is a lot for such a simple editor. Is this just because of PyQt5 which is bundled together with it? Isn't it possible to strip that down? I would have expected something like 5 MB or so.

Also, another question: Is it possible to have this bundled into another existing app? E.g. I have an app where the user could write simple Python scripts to automate something (e.g. the smart playlist logic in a music player), and I was wondering whether I can have a simple editor just inside the app. However, your licence is problematic for this usage, as my apps usually have a BSD or MIT licence or similar. Maybe consider to use LGPL?

These are great questions... briefly:

* Licensing - if you use one of the installers (for OSX or Windows) you're presented with the GPL3 as part of the installation process.

* Mac OSX package (and to the same extent, the Windows installer) - Mu comes with everything bundled in so you don't have to mess around installing a bunch of stuff to make it work. We did it this way after asking for feedback from school network administrators who always said some variation of "make my life as simple as possible". Mu is only just less than 4k lines of Python so, you're right in thinking that the rest of the installer is Qt and a bunch of other stuff (like Tk/tkinter, needed for Python's turtle module to work, something many teachers have told us they need). We also bundle PyGame, iPython, Matplotlib, Numpy etc etc... so they're just there by default if you simply install Mu. In this sense, Mu is a sort of "instant Python for education" (just add learners). ;-)

* Bundling - I'm happy for Mu to be bundled if this were useful to another project although I guess this depends upon what use case you're thinking of. For example, Mu is already "bundled" (in a sense) in Raspbian as a recommended package. If in doubt, just reach out.

As an educator, I appreciate the decision to bundle libraries such as PyGame, Matplotlib, etc with the editor. Although it's important for new coders to learn how to install libraries, it doesn't need to be one of the first things they learn. It's really nice to be able to install an editor, show students a few lines of code, and have it do something more than just print some text to a terminal. (Although, for the record, printing text to a terminal is still immensely satisfying to many new programmers. It makes them feel like they're really programming.)

I've been teaching programming off and on for many years, and I'm teaching another intro course this fall. I can't wait to give Mu a try with students.

Thanks for all your hard work, and the clarity of thinking that's gone into this project.

Thank you!

It's great to see a development tool with this take in the Python ecosystem! I always thought that things like turtle are underappreciated for educational purposes, and having them out of the box in the standard library is a point in favor of Python as a great teaching language. But you took this to 11. :)

Mu uses the QScintilla editor from https://pypi.org/project/QScintilla/, which is GPLv3.

And it should be mentioned that @lordmauve was a collaborator in Mu's development, without whom it wouldn't exist. (Cheers Dan... hope you're enjoying the t-shirt...) ;-)

I think he was actually wearing it yesterday when he wrote that message!

> For some people, this is some of the most important question before they would try out a new app.

Seems like not that big of a deal considering it’s geared towards beginner programmers?

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