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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

In Python education: Getting new language learners to a functional local development environment as quickly and painlessly as possible.

"Just use Anaconda/pipenv/the-Python-installer/Docker/etc" isn't a great answer, because they probably tried one of those six months ago, got into a weird state and can't remember what it did or where it put things.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1987/

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I agree and I have never tried it on windows but I suspect it is worse than Linux because my brother almost threw his laptop out the window when he first started but got along after installing Linux.

I think Rust excels here with:

    curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

And cargo is great to work with. Go seems to have similar problems from my experience.

I'm sure this will be an unpopular answer on HN but have you tried Azure notebooks? Microsoft's Eric Camplin has a series of edX courses[1] that do a great job getting total newbies up and programming with python as painlessly as possible.

[1] https://www.edx.org/bio/eric-camplin

Let their first lesson be that they are responsible for their own machine. If they installed crap without being able to fix it or even remembering what they did, then they'll have to reformat and start over. Suggest they keep notes this time around.

Learning to program is intimidating enough already without telling people they'll have to reformat!

Noobie developers can install packages globally. Apt install python3-pygame would get the base, then use Geany as an ide connected to game.py.

Some terminal use will be needed, but it shouldn't amount to more than running "python3 game.py".

repl.it not a local environment, but if you're after the shortest path to learners being able to code, that's how I do it with the people I teach. Works well.

Yeah that's why I specified "local" - personally I'm keen on https://mybinder.org/ and https://colab.research.google.com/ and https://www.glitch.com/ as remote options.

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