Guido van Rossum on his favorite Python IDE [video]

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3 points·prometheon1··5 comments

In my opinion, the biggest advantage of Emacs is the ability run and evaluate code in a REPL Driven Development style. It is very common in languages like Clojure, less common in Python. You can do a lot in VS Code and PyCharm, but I haven't found a better combination than Emacs and the "elpy" package for this.

I am not sure whether my interpretation of REPL driven development is the same, but in VSCode I use "Python Interactive Window" a lot. I can run lines, .py files and cells (lines of code split by "#%%") in an interactive Python shell, and run simple statement directly in the same shell for inspection and debugging. This sounds like a similar featureset as elpy, but of course the exact workflow of elpy in emacs could still be preferable to you and many others.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py

Sounds like REPL Driven Development to me :)

There's a couple of things you can do to configure the REPL (like auto-reloading modules that has changed during the session). I submitted a link to my blog post about this subject here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394439 (hope it is okay to cross-post like this).

Short summary:

His main opinion is: Use whichever one you prefer. Guido himself went vi -> emacs -> vscode.

Interesting quote:

"To me, VS Code is in a sense the spiritual successor of Emacs"

"I didn't have very good tooling in Emacs to find the definition of a function"

Emacs is not really an IDE unless you spend like a week full time configuring it. Neither is Vim.

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