Ways to Begin

[writerkit]

No one ever mentions that the first step is not learning how code works, but failing at installing your development environment.

Comments

[staranise]

On the upside... a great way to learn how to ask for help and find people who can explain things in a way that works for you?

[writerkit]

Everyone I know is a coder, so I do have plenty of options for that. (And I did eventually get a development environment installed.)

[jducoeur]

Hah! Yes, you have learned the first true lesson of the developer. Getting your environment up and running correctly and the way you want is always a pain.

(In all seriousness: I'm involved with a group that teaches Scala to not-the-usual-demographic, and getting folks up and running has historically been the biggest hurdle for our tutorials.)

[writerkit]

I have installed Pycharm. My father thinks I should be using Eclipse because it's more powerful. I will switch to that once I actually know what it *does*... (This book I am using went off on how Python is great for their class because it spans multiple platforms, and then tells you to download a Windows-only editor.)

[jducoeur]

I suspect your father is incorrect: while Eclipse is conceptually elegant (and open-source, which is nice in principle), I know very few people who actually use it any more. I was one of the very last people using it for Scala, and gave up about two years ago -- the Scala-Eclipse project is pretty much completely dead now.

I will switch to that once I actually know what it does

It's a fancy editor, basically, designed to support programming. It was the state of the art for many years, but most languages have mostly drifted towards other tools. (Even Java, which was Eclipse's primary raison d'etre -- most people I know use IntelliJ for that nowadays.)

To be fair, I don't know what folks tend to use for Python. But I've never heard anyone talks about Eclipse in that context.

Nowadays, the actually hot editor is Visual Studio Code (VSCode). That's a Microsoft project, so some geeks turn up their noses at it on principle, but much of the open-source community has wound up focusing on it, because it's really quite nice.

[writerkit]

It's what he uses at work, I gather, but he's using Perl. What he said was that I shouldn't be using a language-specific editor; I should be using one that spans multiple languages so I don't have to learn a new one every time I learn a new language.

[jducoeur]

While that is a common viewpoint, most people nowadays have moved towards using IntelliJ or VSCode for that purpose -- they are also largely language-neutral.

(Actually, VSCode is rather more language-neutral than Eclipse is: it has a much newer, much cleverer architecture, which is why the Scala community is very enamored of it.)