4 Comments

Refering to the part with IDEs - may i suggest showing something with vim/neovim?

Expand full comment

According to the latest python survey (https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/python/#python_ide), vim is used by about 2% of the community that answered the poll. The most reported used IDE (32% of the cohort) is VSCode. I will seldom do one editor given the series is going to be very long, so I have to chose how to help the most people with a single article, which means I will target the most popular free one.

Besides, if someone chose vim, the person makes a statement about his or her skill level. As it's an editor with a greater entry cost, that requires more practice to be productive, and a longer and more complicated setup to suit one's need, I make the assumption it is chosen by people with a matching ability to do so. If not, then it's a mistake to be reverted, not the teaching material to adapt to it. A tutorial on vim should be made only if the resources allow allow to write it by a large margin, it takes about 50 hours to create such series of articles as is.

On the other hand, VSCode may very well be used by beginners, people that never used the terminal or even students. They need the help more than somebody that can master mouseless editing. It will also attract coders that are less likely to have made the decision to chose an IDE according to their situation, and more by default, or because it's recommended.

It's basically the same reasons I cover how to install Python (https://www.bitecode.dev/p/installing-python-the-bare-minimum) on Windows, Mac and Ubuntu, but not FreeBSD, NixOS or ArchLinux.

You have to chose your battles. People picking those tools chose theirs, and as a writer I have to choose mine.

Your comment is very useful to understand the constraints in which writing is made, and I probably should publish a post dedicated to explaining this. More readers will likely have the same questions as you did.

Expand full comment
May 7Edited

Thank you for elaborate response, I really appreciate the time you took.

I understand your point of view, and while I think one may make other statements by chosing Vim/Emacs (or not chosing VSCode) too, I understand that every path has it's dark and bright corners. I am fresh in this computing world, so i wont be writing much more

Expand full comment

thank you! a very nice article. I like the -s flag. I was lazy and just put assert False into my tests to catch the output put -s is of course much better :-)

Expand full comment