Visual Studio Code – or Code for short – is an open source code editor owned by Microsoft. The debugger shows the call stack as well as the state of local and global variables. It has a powerful debugger which allows single-stepping through the code or over-stepping through each high level function. IDLE lacks any project management facilities, but that’s no problem if your project spans only a handful of files. IDLE supports using spaces or tabs for indentation, and can automagically convert between the two – plus it can indent multiple lines at a time. Your code will be appropriately highlighted and automatically indented, with a configurable indent level. Moving on from here you can open a new window to start coding proper. You can play around with code snippets here, with the bonus that keywords and output will be nicely colored. Starting IDLE will open a Python shell, just as you get when starting Python from the terminal. It’s coded in Python and uses the lightweight tkinter toolkit to draw its GUI.

IDLE (named after Monty Python's Eric Idle) is fairly minimal compared to some of the other offerings around, but it has everything you need and certainly won't get in your way. It's easy to overlook IDLE, Python's very own bespoke Integrated Development Environment. As programming is an increasingly important business sector, especially for cloud services as well as general business applications, there are also paid-for tools that aim to offer more. There is a surprising amount of choice out there, and the open source mentality that underpins a lot of the coding community also applies here, so there are quite a number of free tools available. Additionally, some IDE's have limits on how much code you can use, though are often free to compensate, while paid-for IDE's allow for much more freedom.

While very simple programs don't require specialist tools, once past that stage some form of IDE becomes necessary, but there are a number of different types and some are better at supporting some languages than others.

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) allows you to run programming code written in different programming languages, and having an IDE to run Python is important due to Python's increasingly popular use across a range of computing and scientific applications, underlined by the rise of analytics and business intelligence.

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