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Comment by Bedon292 | Hacker News Reader

If you regularly use Spyder, what is it specifically that you like about it?

I had pretty much thought it was just a tool for people who normally work in R and Matlab to ease into python. Which I totally understand, but is there more to it? It is purely for scientific programming, or do people use it for other things too? Like would you ever write a Django app with it?

What am I missing out on by not using it? For my normal use, I am not seeing anything I can't do in VSCode. Is it worth checking out though?

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Outside of scientific computing, I typically go to Spyder on one-off scripts and smaller projects.

I like Spyder over PyCharm for smaller projects because there's less startup cost and the code cells functionality is handy for the "edit and run this part until it does what I want" style of coding, which makes the bulk of my time in small projects.

For bigger projects, PyCharm's refactoring, commit diffing, code regions, and formatting are enough better to be worth the fuss. As a rule of thumb, if I'm going to bother to set up a dedicated environment / git repo / file structure / test suite, I'll typically use PyCharm, else Spyder.

> and the code cells functionality is handy for the "edit and run this part until it does what I want" style of coding, which makes the bulk of my time in small projects.

Yes, I love this „quick and dirty” interactive style within Spyder too, but switch to PyCharm when I need to refactor, work with larger project or test. Sometimes I'd switch multiple times per day for the same project, so having a more Spyder-like DS tool under development at JetBrains seems to be good news.

I admit that I use it mainly because of all the nice code checking. I've been programming for 40 years, mostly "scientific," but have never made effective use of an IDE. So this is a new experience for me. With the guidance of a couple of colleagues, I'm bring myself up to date on writing quality code.

Thanks for your remarks! I think they are a testament to what we're really trying to: provide a comfortable environment to do scientific computing that also has the nice features you can find in IDEs designed for professional software developers.

I haven't used it, but I immediately decided to try it out, just in the hope that it will make managing matplotlib windows a little more convenient.

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