Python Development Environment

Python was created by Guido van Rossum in the Netherlands in the late 1980s. Python is a multi-paradigm programming language meaning it can be used as an object-oriented language or a structured language. It is useful for creating "quick-and-dirty" apps as well as creating beautiful pieces of software. It is also widely used as a scripting language. Python has very powerful libraries that reduce the amount of time a programmer must spend developing applications. Python 2.0 was released in 2000, and Python 3.0 was released in 2008. However Python 3.0 was not backward-compatible, so many of the features in 3.0 have been back-ported to Python 2.7 which is the most widely used version today. One of the powerful libraries that we will be using is Pygame. Pygame is a library of Python modules designed for writing video games. Pygame was originally written by Pete Shinners and is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (it is open source). It is now a community project with many contributors.

We use Wing as our IDE for Python in our class, however there are many IDEs available for Python.

Python may be downloaded for free at: python.org.

Pygame may be downloaded for free at: pygame.org.