Just so everyone (like people who install the unix distro who, I think, won't get an "icon" to "click" on their "desktop"), the name of the IDE that comes with the distribution is "idle" (as in Interactive DeveLopment Environment, and Eric Idle). "idle -e " opens a file for editing.

When I hit run (in the windows version), a box pops up that says "Error: could not save file". I hit OK and then a Run Script box pops up. Hitting OK there closes that box, and nothing happens.

whoops. In ActivePython, I think you have to save the file before running it (for some reason). Give that a shot. I'll update the post.

Alright, works now. Thanks.

Interesting choice of Python. Python is a really cool language, though I'm surprised you didn't choose PERL. PERL is, IMO, a lot easier to learn, because you don't really have to learn a lot of programming concepts to get something useful up and running. Of course, PERL has the tendency to be write-only (you should see the code that parses various venue's show listings that I wrote), so it could be hard to actually teach someone.

The most confusing thing about python is all the magic double-underscore stuff. I guess a beginner programmer probably doesn't need to worry about it, but I found it contradictory to Python's otherwise simple and straightforward syntax.

Apologies if I missed the blog entry that predicated this tutorial; it's not on the main page

Hey HaH, glad to have you along (the more programmers to identify my mistakes the better). The original post outlining my reasons for choosing Python is here -- I'll eventually link to it from this entry to provide easy navigation for googlers.

I agree that Python has some slight weirdness -- but it's certainly much easier to read than Perl. I'm still getting used to the latter (and I think I'll always hate having different comparison operators for strings and numeric variables). We probably won't get into too much language-specific weirdness; I'm going to keep things procedural, and focus on manipulating web forms (and the concepts necessary to do so).

OK, the icon for ActivePython is supercute.

I find it disappointing that it sends the output of the program to an input line in an interpreter window, yet won't execute a dynamically generated command. Perhaps a safety/security decision? After I saw that the output of 'print "hello world"' was printed after the ">>>" prompt instead of looking like an output line, I tried 'print "print \"hello world\" "' and 'print "print \"hello world\" "' and those commands showed up correctly color-coded in the interpreter window as if they would execute but wouldn't run, even if I manually entered a return.

Becks, dynamically generated statements are executed with the "exec" statement, and dynamically generated expressions with the "eval()" builtin.

Eg (this is from an interactive IDLE session, and the statements aren't actually dynamically generated, but you'll get the idea):

>>> exec "print 'hi'"
hi
>>> a, b = range(2)
>>> eval('a + b')
1
>>> exec """\
def spam(*a):
   return [e for (i,e) in enumerate(a) if i % 2]
"""
>>> eval('spam(1,2,3,"hello everyone", spam)')
[2, 'hello everyone']
>>>

I don't know what the ActivePython IDE looks like that you might think that just printing something might make the interpreter execute the printed statement.

eval() has two optional arguments, corresponding to global and local dictionaries (namespaces) providing the context in which to evaluate the code (you can execute help(eval) at the top level in an interactive environment for its behavior). The same is true of exec:

>>> exec "a = 3"
>>> a
3
>>> g = {}
>>> exec "a = 4" in g
>>> a, g['a']
(3, 4)
>>> L = {}
>>> exec "a = 7" in g, L
>>> a, g['a'], L['a']
(3, 4, 7)
>>> 

i finally got around to trying this, and i succeeded! i'm a programmer! finally.