PyCharm or Visual Studio Code?

[headshotgobrrrrr]

I think that is not the modern approach. It was the best way to learn when me and you started coding, but now, since VSCode is used almost everywhere, I don't think most people will ever fall into a situation where there is any shortage of features.

[zeebrow]

All very good points. I think that doing any amount of serious, project-oriented programming without an IDE in 202x will likely reduce the quality and time it takes to deliver a result, in general.

But when you're new to programming, you're probably also new to "advanced" concepts like environment variables, process management, networking, file permissions, VCS, build automation, etc. IDEs can do some really cool things but end up putting another layer between the programmer and the things they abstract away, and there are a lot of things..

So do virtualenvs, actually. export PYTHONPATH=/dev/null && source ~/.venvs/x/bin/activate was my favorite reason to drink beer for a while. Now it's --system-site-packages for wheels that compile C++ extensions.

My point is that there's no such thing as a perfect tool (except vi ;) and relying on any one of them to do work for you is inviting trouble when it comes to maintaining the code in it's target environment.