Integrated Development Environment

 Integrated Development Environment

Also known as IDEs, I'm looking at a variety of integrated development environments starting with software development using python.  Basically the IDEs that I've looked at can fall into one of two general categories.  They're either for beginners, novices and are basic stripped-down versions to get started quickly and/or for educational purposes.  Or they are advanced, feature-rich, somewhat complicated IDEs for a specific subject matter domain, for example engineering. 

I've decided that since this is a new language and I want to get started quickly with some basic software dev,  I will start off with an IDE from the first category - something basic and quick to learn.  More specifically I've decided to use Thonny as my IDE because it also has the added advantage that it simultaneously installs the newest version of python and then optionally handshakes with it via a shell or terminal that you can launch from within the Thonny IDE. Thonny is free. https://thonny.org/

 Thonny offers some options and packages and plugins that can installed and or created by you.

 It does handshake seamlessly with Plotter for making simple line graphs of your data, and also with Flask which is a web development platform.

You have some flexibility on how involved you want to run the debugger. In fact, Thonny is designed to be educational, so the emphasis on debugging flexibility over other features make sense.

 Thonny is a project on GitHub and it does have a Wiki.

 I do recommend installing the friendly-traceback  package, however the birdseye plugin (which is supposed to be an advanced version of debugging but really amounts to profiling of your code) is not working despite numerous attempts to get it to do so. If you really want to have birdseye running on Thonny, you'll either have to do some sort of manual patching of special files into the Thonny project directories or you'll have to work with Thonny in the developer's release version. Even then I'm not guaranteeing that the birdseye profiler will actually run, but it increases your chances based on some people having had success with manual patches and running in developer mode. Look at the Thonny GitHub project's Issues page for more details.