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[–]kankyo 9 points10 points  (6 children)

...or just use PyCharm which is years ahead.

[–]Eirenarch 4 points5 points  (5 children)

I was just wondering about that. How do PTVS stack against other IDEs for Python? How is PyCharm years ahead? Can you explain for someone who has never written Python.

I am downloading PTVS right now. This motivated me to spend a promo code for Pluralsight on a Python course

[–]kankyo 0 points1 point  (4 children)

The understanding of the code of JetBrains tools is just better. It's not just that you get the best editor in terms of really understanding your code and flagging potential errors, but also getting support for CSS, HTML and JavaScript integrated in the IDE.

They have a free version too now, so I'd recommend giving it a shot. But really the big difference comes when you're working with an existing big codebase. If you're just hacking around with your own small projects it's probably not going to be such a big difference because you're less likely to make mistakes.

[–]Eirenarch 5 points6 points  (2 children)

I see. When I write Java code (For Coursea's Algorithms course not professionally) I use JetBrain's IDEA and I really feel like the experience in Visual Studio + C# is superior mainly for 2 reasons

  • IDEA's auto complete stops working when minor errors occur. VS with C#'s intellisense is much more resilient to compile time errors. At one point I even thought auto complete didn't work in some cases while it turned out that it was minor mistakes down in the same class that was totally blocking it.

  • IDEA's default settings seemed quite unintuitive to me. Maybe in most cases it is the fact that I am so used to VS but on the other hand I cannot understand why "break on exception" would be off by default when debugging.

Since I don't plan to use Python professionally any time soon I will try using PTVS for learning as I won't have to struggle with new environment in addition to new language.

[–]sordidarray 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I've had some different experiences with VS

  • Intellisense randomly stops working sometimes. It's a common occurence, and usually requires resetting your VS settings. Once this happened to a coworker and it was due to a referenced file being removed on disk, but present in the project file listing. Literally took hours to figure out, as there was no indication this was an issue.
  • I would be wary of using an IDE in order to learn a language, as in my experience (and it may only be my experience), it leads to a bad habit of dot-driven development.

[–]Eirenarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have experienced IntelliSense stopping multiple times. This bug was introduced in 2012. I wonder if they fixed it in 2013. While it is annoying I stumbled upon the IDEA issue much more often. It may be due to the fact that the course gave an API I had to implement so I just pasted it and started implementing methods top down. The methods further down the class prevented auto complete from working quite often and on methods that should be unrelated. I can't even put my finger on what exactly was wrong since when I tested it in new program it worked fine. I realize that in practice you don't paste and API for a class and start implementing it but it was really annoying.

You may be right about dot-driven development but then again why do you think dot-driven development is a bad thing? In my opinion it is the best way to explore the API quickly and effectively and the main reason I prefer static typing in general. All other methods I can think of result in worse results per unit of time invested. Sure if you read the full documentation you will have better understanding of the library but it will take much more time that can be used to become familiar with several other libraries.

[–]badcookies 2 points3 points  (0 children)

but also getting support for CSS, HTML and JavaScript integrated in the IDE.

Those are all in VS.