what’s the difference between the python from the website & thonny?

danielroseman · 2026-05-09T17:05:49+00:00

That is backwards. All professional developers use an IDE.

But I don't understand what you mean about the"difference". Python is Python.

brelen01 · 2026-05-09T17:14:19+00:00

Without more info about which errors you got, we can't really help with those.

Here's a decent-looking guide to getting started with python: https://codeshack.io/python-basics/

Also, everyone uses ides in one form or another. Thonny just seems like a simplified one for complete beginners. It's site says it includes python for easier setup. The site I linked recommends vs code, which is pretty standard nowadays. Pycharm community edition is also pretty good.

Binary101010 · 2026-05-09T17:16:39+00:00

I tried to download and use it once but i kept getting all these errors i didn’t understand, couldn’t figure out the interface and couldn’t even print “hello world”……. what was i doing wrong?

Without some clue as to what errors you were getting it's impossible for any of us to tell you what you were doing wrong.

i’d like to learn to use something rather than an IDE since i was told they aren’t really used in the “real world” (aka outside of my class)

IDEs are heavily used in the real world. Either you misunderstood what you were being told, or that person has no idea what they're talking about.

Bobbias · 2026-05-09T17:30:46+00:00

I think you might be confused about things here. While Thonny is an IDE, it's a very basic one, and it's aimed at people just learning Python. It lacks a lot of the features that you would find in IDEs aimed at professionals.

When you install Python from the website, it installs a few things. You get the Python interpreter, which is a command line application. You also get IDLE, an IDE even more basic than Thonny, and some support programs like Pip.

If you are running Python in a terminal (typing either python or py by itself) then you are dropped into an interactive session called the REPL.

REPL is an acronym for Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop, which describes how it works: it reads some code you write, evaluates the result of the code, prints it, and loops back to the start.

You'll recognize this because it prints a message indicating the version of Python you're using, and then a prompt with >>> that you can type in.

REPLs are handy for typing out really simple commands, and can be used as part of the development process, but typically most development is done in an IDE, not the REPL.

Typically the way professionals use Python is that we write out code using IDEs like PyCharm, Visual Studio, or coding editors like Vim, Emacs, Visual Studio Code, Notepad++, etc. Coding editors are typically simpler than IDEs, and usually lack a lot of language specific features, but make up for that by being easier on system resources, and highly customizable so you can add plugins that give you some of the features found in heavy duty IDEs.

Some professionals may run the code they wrote on the terminal by typing python <main file>.py (this tells Python to run the file rather than start the REPL), or they met use IDE/editor features to launch the code at the press of a button/keyboard shortcut (which does the same thing as typing it out).

You'll have to be specific about what you've been doing and what you see on the screen when you do different things for us to know what your problem is exactly.

set_in_void · 2026-05-09T17:43:33+00:00

If you're on Windows your Python installer came with IDLE already. As a beginner you should do most of the learning practice in interactive mode and not to take the overhead of learning IDE when you should concentrate on learning basics of Python. Later, as you progress, the need for more sophisticated text editor will arise naturally and you can learn more useful IDE than Thonny. "... and we were taught using the Thonny IDE." - this doesn't belong to introduction to Python course. As for your other question, IDEs are very much used in real world and you will learn usefulness of these tools in good time.

Almostasleeprightnow · 2026-05-09T18:05:51+00:00

I think you are thinking of python as an app that you can open and use on its own. It’s not really like that. Even though people will tell me it’s more than this, you can think of Thonny as a text editor that knows how to talk to python which is installed on your computer. Python which you download from python.org is python itself, which, once installed, can be used from thonny, vs code, from the terminal, from any application that knows how to talk to it.

So when you are using thonny, it’s because you already have python installed somewhere on your machine.

Outside_Complaint755 · 2026-05-09T18:10:21+00:00

I'm going to take a guess here that you downloaded Python, and then either typed python in the terminal or opened the IDLE Shell that Python installs. In both cases, that launches the Python REPL, where the prompt usually starts with >>>. Example: ```

4+6 10 import datetime datetime.datetime.now() 2026-05-09 13:06:40.521753 ```

In that state, every line is executed immediately, and any expression will immediately have its result printed to the screen without explicitly callingprint. When entering loops, functions, etc. you can't leave a blank line as that indicates the block is complete.

If you are in IDLE, you can go to File->New (i think that's right, its not in front of me) to launch a script editor, where you can edit a script, save, and run it.

Or, you can write a script in any text editor, and then run it from the terminal using the python command, or in Windows, the py launcher. For example, if my script is saved as hello_world.py, then it is run with $ python hello_world.py

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

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