Flutterby™! : Debuggers for Python

Steve Coast, who is probably one of the biggest proponents (both in word and action) of free software and data, recently took a position at Microsoft. As far as I can tell, it's his first experience with the Redmond Koolaid. His insights aren't really new but it's fun to watch someone who was an unabashed Micro hater come to terms with the fact that Microsoft actually does some things quite well. One of those is delivering a really good IDE and visual debugger. Note: that link is really about Steve's impression of the latest version of Microsoft DAO/ADO/Jet/Linq and I pointed out his error on his blog.

But reading his blog after spending a day chasing trivial logic errors in Python made me really long for a good visual debugger. A few years back, I ended up writing some code in C++ partly because I could find better debuggers for that language than I could for Python. Unfortunately, that code is going unused because it's nearly impossible to find Geography Grad students who can write C++.

Anyhow, I'm ready to spend actual $ on a real debugger. My time chasing stupid logic and syntax errors in Python is worth more. ActiveState Komodo seems to be the top choice. Is Eclipse/PyDev worth the effort? How well do they play with ArcGIS?