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Comment by nrjames | Hacker News Reader

I do a lot of Python work and like most of the other "heavy" IDEs, this doesn't appeal to me at all. The more layers of stuff you wrap around what you're trying to do, the harder it is, in my experience, to make it easy to deploy and maintain. I guess I'm turning into a graybeard.

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> The more layers of stuff you wrap around what you're trying to do, the harder it is, in my experience, to make it easy to deploy and maintain.

I'm not sure how your choice of editor has any impact on your ability to deploy and maintain your code.

/team lead/

Totally understand - Visual Studio can be somewhat heavy weight especially for basic editing. In that case, check VS Code's Python support. It's very lightweight and cross-platform:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python

I can see how the value of an IDE is much smaller in a dynamic language than a statically typed one. In the statically typed language compiler output, test output source symbols etc are links to other things in the project. That's hard to accomplish in an editor + shell setup (or requires a huge config effort that effectively makes the editor an IDE). I would use vscode or similar if I did JS or Python, but for C# or Java you'd have to pry the IDE from my cold dead hands :)

Even with a dynamically typed language, the IDE can do type inference to provide a lot of useful stuff, like go to definition of a symbol, or refactoring.

And when the IDE exploits Python 3 type annotation, the "static vs. dynamic" gap is much less painful.

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