I love Python. It’s a beautiful language; simple, concise, and it’s a much more “pure” object-oriented language than others. (PHP, I’m looking at you.) It does have its drawbacks, mostly as a consequence of duck typing, but I can’t think of very many situations where that would present a significant drawback.[1]

In this quickie, I’d like to introduce something I recently discovered while working through a TurboGears tutorial. It’s called IPython and is an incredibly useful interactive shell. (Be aware that the IPython site doesn’t appear to be working at the moment.) For a quick overview, take a look at the Wikipedia entry. If you’d rather hear my take, here it is:

• It supports tabbed auto-completion – You can use this to auto-complete module names (and module paths like twisted.web.http) or to inspect object methods, class methods, and just about anything else
• It works like most common shells – Even under Windows, you can fire up IPython and obtain a reasonably Unix-like shell.
• Looking through the Wikipedia entry, it has a few other useful features such as the capability of running blocking functions in a separate thread of execution.

With as long as IPy has been around, I’m surprised I just discovered it. I have heard of it before, but my previous biases of self-hosting language shells being rather poor apparently interfered with my desire to try new things. Try it! You won’t regret it; it’s certainly a lot easier than inspecting everything with dir() when you can’t remember whether that method was has_index or hasindex!

Footnotes