Python IDE for Mac OS X?

benbranch asks: "I am presently learning the Python programming language. The language itself is brilliant and seems very easy to pick up, however my problem is finding a decent IDE. I use Mac OS X (as Windows is excruciating), and though I love Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) all my work computers are Mac's. Can anyone advise me as too a good open source IDE for Mac? If there are any Python programmers out there using Macs, I would love to hear from you."

similar situation

[gimpimp]

i'm in a similar situation, having just bought my first mac, but i'm looking for ruby ide's. os x is fantastic, and so far ahead of desktop linux, i dont want to go back. one thing that lets it down though, are the ide's available. i've settled on eclipse [eclipse.org], since it handles python, ruby etc. you do need to install python/ruby support, but it's easily done. the python extensions can be found here: pyDev [sourceforge.net]

Re:Objective C

[Anonymous Coward]

Outside of Cocoa no new ObjC code seems to be written at all. Which probably says something about that language.

Re:The Unix Programming Environment ...

[jnana]

That's pretty funny.

1) How do you use the shell to change a method name on a type and all subclasses, along with all invocations of that method on objects of those types? I can do this across a 100,000 LOC code base in a couple of seconds, and in making this kinds of changes regularly for a couple of years now, Eclipse has never screwed up this kind of refactoring.

2) How does your shell ide find all references to a given method? Eclipse uses a full-text search engine (Lucene) and searches against a compiled index, and it answers such questions in a second or two. Your grep solution will be much slower (you're doing brute-force text search vs something closer to a hashtable lookup), will take you a long time to develop (you can't just grep for the method name, because you have to check the type of the object too), and will probably be wrong and incomplete.

And there are tons of other features of a good ide that I could ask about. I would suspect you are a troll, but I hear this kind of thing so often that I think you're probably just oblivious to the features a good IDE provides, or never having used one for a while on a large project, are oblivious to how useful and frequently used features such as I outlined above really are.

I use vim a lot still for text editor tasks, and I still use emacs for lisp stuff, but I would never go back to doing Java in Emacs/JDT. For the languages that don't yet have good IDEs, you may have a point, as what people are calling IDEs are really just text editors.

Re:the truth about objective-c

[JulesLt]

The thing I like about it is that, as commented, if you know 'C', you can learn the syntax in minutes. Compared to C++ it has a lot of elegance, which is attractive to some programmers.

That said, most of what you need to take advantage of most languages these days are the standard packages and frameworks, rather than the syntax. I guess that's another debate altogether - simple languages with large standard libraries vs complex languages.