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Comment by ccordoba12 | Hacker News Reader

Well, this is the thing: code completion in Python is not a a simple task and we've struggled for years to improve it. Now we support the Language Server Protocol (designed by Microsoft for VSCode), but still things are not great, i.e. there are many things that can't be completed by Jedi, specially for scientific libraries.

So, thanks to Kite's software, we implemented a client for it and now lightly promote it to our users, to offer them a possibility that works better, but it's completely optional.

We also consulted our community before adding Kite integration and they were favorable to it, that's why we decided to proceed with the idea: https://twitter.com/Spyder_IDE/status/1138466325532217346

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Like a fellow poster said, that's easily manipulated, especially if the marketing of a VC-funded startup jumps on the train. My concern with this would be that you've arguably turned a nice free (as in freedom!), open-source-tool into a vehicle to push more or less proprietary and user-tracking code onto naive, unknowing users (though I guess that is not too uncommon in the anaconda-ecosystem you target - spack user and guix/nix-sympathiser here). Why make it a nagscreen (not sure about the extent of that), if you could just make it an option or a status message.

For me you're now just competing with every proprietary python IDE, which basically drops you of my list of tools to use or recommend (one can also use free PyCharm or VSCode or RStudio then, where you know, what you get...)

> My concern with this would be that you've arguably turned a nice free (as in freedom!), open-source-tool into a vehicle to push more or less proprietary and user-tracking code onto naive, unknowing users

I respectfully disagree. First, the decision was not only mine, but from our team and community (see my post just above yours). Second, you are not losing any freedom by simply dismissing our message to take a look at Kite. And third, Kite doesn't track our users.

> Why make it a nagscreen (not sure about the extent of that), if you could just make it an option or a status message.

This is quite common in Hacker News: you're criticizing us without knowing how this works. We only show a message about Kite once. Then we show another message in the editor *if* our code completion machinery can't provide completions but Kite does. Both can be dismissed with a single click, that's it. These features are annoying for the user that started this thread because their settings are reset every day.

> For me you're now just competing with every proprietary python IDE

We are effectively competing with other editors and IDEs, with or without Kite. If giving the chance to (not forcing) our users to have better code completions makes us more competitive, I'm all for it.

I can attest to that kite was only promoted once to me through anaconda... However, kite itself has gone above and beyond to try and nag me into buying their enterprise edition - it's only just made me hate the software.

It will suggest "" completions at the top of the list, even for incredibly mundane completions, which is apparently a "premium completion" which almost immediately results in a nagging popup that requests that we purchase the enterprise edition because "you are out of your daily premium completions". If anything, I wish the spyder team would completely disallow kite to push their product in that kind of way, because it completely goes against what open-source projects stand for.

> 147 Votes in 606 days

At the time we did that poll we had ~1000 followers on Twitter, so that's 15% of our audience, which is pretty good for an online poll.

But more important than that, we receive ~200 issues per month on Github (which makes us one of the projects in the PyData stack with higher values on this metric) and I don't remember a single one since we rolled out this feature that argued strongly to remove it. So either people dismiss our suggestion, or try it and decide if they like or not.

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