Python 2.6.4 (r264:75706, Nov 2 2009, 14:38:03)
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
IPython 0.10 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.
? -> Introduction and overview of IPython's features.
%quickref -> Quick reference.
help -> Python's own help system.
object? -> Details about 'object'. ?object also works, ?? prints more.
In [1]:
Not any sort of actual setup the user is expected to perform.
As for "no installation", it's not that hard to install ipython on Linux. Windows, well, that's another story. But I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. The problem is not whether it came installed or not, as the effort to install is very low for anybody who's going to be motivated to do this sort of exploration in the first place. The question is, how is anybody supposed to discover that this is possible? I knew about iPython and I didn't even know it was that easy.
Additionally, you did not find this because it was sitting right in front of you. I have many friends who had things like Commodore 64s who never learned squat about them. You found them because you found documentation about it that wasn't drowned in gigabytes upon gigabytes of other information. You had limited, high-quality documentation to draw on, or good magazines, in the days that all the good magazines ran stuff like this. That's the missing step here; not the existence of good learning tools, all of which will actually blow away the experience you could get on those older machines (which were easy, but incredibly limited), but a way for anybody to stumble on them and find out what they are in the current environment, when a site full of crappy little flash games is orders of magnitude easier to find that a tutorial on Processing (http://processing.org/ ).
Python 2.6.4 (r264:75706, Nov 2 2009, 14:38:03) Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
Not any sort of actual setup the user is expected to perform.As for "no installation", it's not that hard to install ipython on Linux. Windows, well, that's another story. But I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. The problem is not whether it came installed or not, as the effort to install is very low for anybody who's going to be motivated to do this sort of exploration in the first place. The question is, how is anybody supposed to discover that this is possible? I knew about iPython and I didn't even know it was that easy.
Additionally, you did not find this because it was sitting right in front of you. I have many friends who had things like Commodore 64s who never learned squat about them. You found them because you found documentation about it that wasn't drowned in gigabytes upon gigabytes of other information. You had limited, high-quality documentation to draw on, or good magazines, in the days that all the good magazines ran stuff like this. That's the missing step here; not the existence of good learning tools, all of which will actually blow away the experience you could get on those older machines (which were easy, but incredibly limited), but a way for anybody to stumble on them and find out what they are in the current environment, when a site full of crappy little flash games is orders of magnitude easier to find that a tutorial on Processing (http://processing.org/ ).