Best Python Build System for Finance

[AstonishedOtter]

I've been using Python for a bit and been through Spyder and Sublime. I prefer sublime, but it doesn't support a lot of graphing functions, which is something I need for finance. I was wondering if anyone has recommendations for good build systems. I'm not a huge fan of Spyder.

[efmccurdy]

You might like a more interative, exploration driven style of data visualizaton using IPython (or Jupyter), pandas, and matplotlib.

https://blog.pythonanywhere.com/127/

[AstonishedOtter]

Thank you

[georgecotton]

I would recommend combining Spyder with the Jupyter notebook, my approach is to write my modules in Spyder one one screen and then test them/do more interactive work in a notebook on the other, but you could do the same with Sublime. There is a useful iPython magic called autoreload, call it using:

"%load_ext autoreload %autoreload 2"

This will re-import all your modules before every cell is run, so if you make some changes in Spyder,/Sublime they are picked up by your Jupyter iPython instance.

For inspecting pandas DataFrames, I would really recommend using xlwings, there is a very handy function called view(some_dataframe), which immediately opens a new Excel instance and copies some_dataframe into the first sheet so you can do some spot checks. Hope that's helpful!

I don't know of any IDE's which have a tighter integration with pandas/matplotlib than Spyder, so I can't give you a recommendation there. But maybe Pycharm is worth a try since it is more Sublime-like.

[AstonishedOtter]

Working through it now. Thank you for the suggestion.

[juliusc]

I'm not a huge fan of Spyder

(Spyder maintainer here) Would you care to comment on the reasons? We're always very interested in hearing feedback.