VS Code in Anaconda Distribution 5.1

anaconda.com

50 points·smortaz··6 comments

As someone new to Python, does anyone know if there is a FAQ anywhere that does a decent job of explaining the difference(?) between Anaconda vs plain Python (pip vs conda, that's a thing I think right?) I imagine one eventually learns this via osmosis after working in the environment for a while, but it's a bit mysterious to newcomers. I've got like 6 versions of pip.exe on my (Windows) laptop right now.

For development, I find Anaconda much better than pip. [This Stack Overflow reponse](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20994716/what-is-the-dif...) answers your question pretty well.

Anaconda provides more than Python libraries (C/C++ libraries, R packages).

The conda package manager can create isolated 'environments' (like virtualenv but not only for Python) that are very space efficient due to using hardlinks.

The conda-forge community has sprung up to develop recipes and provide packages. The Anaconda Distribution recipes are now actually built from github forks of these conda-forge recipes (we hope to achieve binary compatibility with them sometime soon).

FYI, this isn’t Visual Studio, but VS Code, with the Python support enabled. The latter is a lightweight crossplat editor++.

> lightweight

For those unaware, VS Code is an Electron app. Depending on how you feel about using a browser to run a text editor, this may not be considered lightweight.

Git for Windows installer does the same thing, I learned recently.

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