Real World Instrumentation with Python

Python Development Tools

A good development environment can make the difference between success and frustration. The development environment must, at a minimum, provide some way to create and edit Python source code as a standard ASCII text file. Additional tools, such as debuggers, automatic documentation generators, and version control are all good, but one could get by without them if absolutely necessary. Fortunately this isn’t necessary, given that there are a lot of excellent FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) tools available, and some very good and inexpensive commercial tools as well.

In this section we’ll take a brief look at what is available, with a primary emphasis on FOSS tools. It doesn’t really matter what tools you use, and most people have (or develop over time) their own preferences and work habits. The important thing to take away here is that there are many paths available, and choosing the right one is simply a matter of picking the tools that feel right and selecting the right tools for the job.

Editors and IDEs

At the very least, you will need a text editor or integrated development environment (IDE) of some sort for entering and editing Python source code. You may also want to use the editor for your C source code when writing extensions (which we will delve into in Chapter 5), so it may be a good idea to pick something that’s language-neutral, or perhaps language-aware with syntax highlighting.

The primary difference between an editor and an IDE lies in how ...