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Comment by gspr | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, I'm sure Spyder has lots of merits (and I'm sure the devs are wonderful people), but I've spent so much time fixing fellow academics' Python problems that were in the end rooted in "I don't know what I'm doing, so I installed this Spyder thing and it has now taken over every aspect of Python on my computer" that I feel a visceral negative reaction to the name in my body. Not Spyder's fault, of course, but nonetheless.

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Things can get very messy when installing Spyder via pip and then trying to upgrade stuff. Distutils tends to screw these updates up. I've nuked my local Python packages recently due to that mess and made a clean reinstall, but I guess that's not what you'd like to do if you have many Python packages other than Spyder installed.

Agreed, installing Spyder with pip can lead to a lot of headaches. That's why we don't recommend to use it and suggest Anaconda/conda instead. But that solution also became problematic during the last couple of years (conda is too slow or throws back a huge dependency errors).

That's why we decided to create our own, self-contained installers for Windows and macOS: https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/releases/tag/v4.2.1

Since they are completely isolated and don't come with pip, they can't be broken. And you can connect them to other Python environments by following these instructions: http://docs.spyder-ide.org/current/faq.html#using-existing-e...

(Spyder maintainer here) I don't understand your comment. Spyder is like any other regular Python package, so it can't take over your computer. We have some customizations to run code, but that's to provide a better experience to users.

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