Wing - I found this very useful with good debugger, auto-complete, project management and it is scriptable in python. Can be a bit slow at times though - you need a good machine to run it.
emacs - I ended up getting frustrated with the number of different options for python (ECB vs rope vs python.el vs python-mode.el vs ...) and I also couldn't get auto-complete working too well and it seemed to take a lot of setting up. It is good to have choices but as a novice it can be somewhat bewildering.
SPE - no-one has mentioned this yet but I found it usable - auto-complete is surprisingly good. With some project management facilities it could be very good indeed. Worth a try...
Dual quad core xeons, 4 gigs of ram, and a RAID 0 dual 2.5" SAS drives, 73gb 10K rpm solved that problem for me.
Also, I hate how much hardware it takes to make anything run well.
Moore's Law is wrong about cost, it takes the same amount of money as before to make things run as well as it used to.
Honestly, if we're going to use languages like Ruby/Python/Perl which are so expensive on cycles it's ridiculous, can we save ourselves some computation pain, and skip the rest of the way to SBCL? Please? It's a minor speed penalty compared to ruby.
emacs - I ended up getting frustrated with the number of different options for python (ECB vs rope vs python.el vs python-mode.el vs ...) and I also couldn't get auto-complete working too well and it seemed to take a lot of setting up. It is good to have choices but as a novice it can be somewhat bewildering.
SPE - no-one has mentioned this yet but I found it usable - auto-complete is surprisingly good. With some project management facilities it could be very good indeed. Worth a try...