Anaconda is the recommended environment

Even if you have Python working in some fashion on your computers already, I would recommend installing Anaconda, which is a “distribution” of Python (and some other things, including NLTK) that makes setting up Python and related software much easier than most of the alternatives.

(The Anaconda distribution makes everything pretty painless, you don’t have to worry about, e.g., not having matplotlib installed, etc., and it also contains some other stuff that we’ll use later in the semester (notably R).

To install it, go to the Anaconda page, click on “Download”, pick your platform (Mac, Windows, or Linux), and download the Python 3.6 version. For the Mac, I’d advise picking the graphical installer option. Double-click on the downloaded package, follow the instructions.

When you’re finished, you should have an anaconda folder in your home folder (which might not be immediately visible on the Mac—open your Documents folder and then press command + up-arrow to move out of your Documents folder up in the hierarchy, and at that point you should see the anaconda folder). Inside that folder you should see an application called Navigator. If you already see a python application in there, you can double click on that, but otherwise double-click on Navigator and then install/launch Spyder.

This will give you a multipanel interface, with a temporary file on the left, and an “IPython console” in the lower right. The “IPython console” is basically like IDLE. You can drag the separators around to make it bigger.

I’ll use this in class, so you can see how I use it there as well.