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Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

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Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#101

Post by ajford »

mmmBacon wrote: post #16
bfjckgkgnt wrote: post #8

If you use this, you are a junior dev - embarrassing

Guess I’m junior then. I learned how to code via scientific coding so I love Spyder for its simplicity. When I want to work deeply on a difficult problem and want to quickly flesh out ideas it’s my go to because it sandboxes really well and I can iterate much faster in it. I use more advanced IDE when integrating the code I developed in Spyder into a larger code base. I’m sure many will criticize my workflow but I’ve…

Ignore anyone criticizing your workflow. Tools like Spyder and Jupyter can be great when working with datasets in a way that IDEs aren't quite suited for.

Variable explorers and integrated charting/plotting can be fantastic for visualizing and understanding your data.

Cells in Jupyter are great for quickly iterating on data cleaning code.

When I was part of a scientific applications team at a past employer (state agency), we used Jupyter heavily while developing the core code for the data processing pipelines.

We were reading and processing data from instruments based on (bad) docs and notes from a former employee who reverse-engineered the format, so there was a lot of edge-case finding and testing. The notebooks fleshed out with comments and notes in Markdown upon completion and were saved within our repo as interactive documentation, demonstrating the more complicated processing steps in a far more approachable fashion.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#102

Post by ccordoba12 »

tobmlt wrote: post #95

As someone who has used spyder everyday for years, it’s really getting in my way lately. Important caveat: I’ve just recently upgraded from some really old versions to the latest spyder. Now it throws off my work flow by continuously tripping code hints or suggestions or whatever. When I try and click into the interpreter I find now I’d better click two or three times instead of one — to subvert the type hint that is…

Yes, you can disable hovers and hints completely. For that you need to go to the menu

    Tools > Preferences
and then

    Completion and linting > Introspection
and disable there "Show calltips" and "Enable hover hints".

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#103

Post by m_kos »

cheptsov wrote: post #38
jonnycomputer wrote: post #36

Has anybody used Pycharm's Scientific project type for data analysis?

Hey, a PM of PyCharm here. Justin case someone will find it useful and relevant. Our team is currently working on a brand new IDE (based on PyCharm) for data scientists. A big part of what we're doing is convenient support for Jupyter notebooks within the IDE. This new IDE is currently under development but already provides the support for notebooks similar to how the native web Jupyter notebooks work – cells and out…

Hey, a big fan of PyCharm here!

I played with PyCharm's implementation of notebooks in 2019. At that time, it felt like you didn't do any UX research and testing with professional data scientists, including data scientists across a range of age groups. For this reason, I stopped using PyCharm for analytical data science work.

I am mentioning it here, just because I would love for your new project to succeed. Good luck!

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#104

Post by ccordoba12 »

lytefm wrote: post #74
zupreme wrote: post #41

I use the Anaconda-packaged version of Spyder on a daily basis. Great product, although I can never seem to get the IDE updates to consistently work within that environment. Nevertheless it is my favorite IDE for Python.

I'm not much of an Anaconda fan, but installing Spyder as a user package (pip install -U spyder) has always worked out well for me. After an upgrade, all I've ever needed to do was to upgrade to the spyder-kernels in my venv. Spyder is such a great tool and much more useful than Jupyter Notebooks for explorative DS work, imho. Thank a lot for maintaining it, Carlos. I don't mind the kite installer - but I've tried it…

Thanks a lot for your kind words! And I'm glad to know Spyder works smoothly for you with pip (it's not usually the case).

Too bad you had a bad experience with Kite, but (as I said several times here), it's completely optional.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#105

Post by ajford »

ccordoba12 wrote: post #85
refactor_master wrote: post #71

Eh, Streamlit and PyCharm is a much more powerful combination IMO. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about variable explorer always felt like training wheels to me.

I respectfully disagree. The variable explorer allows to check what variables you have declared and how they change with changes in your code. This is critical for scientific computing because you're constantly interacting with data (i.e. reading, cleaning, plotting and analyzing it), so having a dedicated pane for it is a great advantage.

I've found that people who aren't working on large data cubes or time series don't see as much value in variable explorers.

Anyone who's dealt with huge data arrays appreciate it.

Also, just wanna say Spyder looks like it's come a long way in the last decade. Congrats on some fine work!

Spyder got me off Matlab nearly a decade ago. I had just learned Python and had trouble getting Matlab access in my lab (I was an undergrad working on radio astro data) and after many weeks fighting with our dept. IT over a license, I started using Spyder, and it was pretty awesome. So many thanks to everyone who worked on Spyder!

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#106

Post by cheptsov »

m_kos wrote: post #103
cheptsov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, a PM of PyCharm here. Justin case someone will find it useful and relevant. Our team is currently working on a brand new IDE (based on PyCharm) for data scientists. A big part of what we're doing is convenient support for Jupyter notebooks within the IDE. This new IDE is currently under development but already provides the support for notebooks similar to how the native web Jupyter notebooks work – cells and out…

Hey, a big fan of PyCharm here! I played with PyCharm's implementation of notebooks in 2019. At that time, it felt like you didn't do any UX research and testing with professional data scientists, including data scientists across a range of age groups. For this reason, I stopped using PyCharm for analytical data science work. I am mentioning it here, just because I would love for your new project to succeed. Good luc…

Thank you so much. I totally understand what you mean. And this is exactly what we try to improve. Anyway, always happy to hear feedback and pass it over to the team.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#107

Post by tobmlt »

ccordoba12 wrote: post #102
tobmlt wrote: post #95

As someone who has used spyder everyday for years, it’s really getting in my way lately. Important caveat: I’ve just recently upgraded from some really old versions to the latest spyder. Now it throws off my work flow by continuously tripping code hints or suggestions or whatever. When I try and click into the interpreter I find now I’d better click two or three times instead of one — to subvert the type hint that is…

Yes, you can disable hovers and hints completely. For that you need to go to the menu Tools > Preferences and then Completion and linting > Introspection and disable there "Show calltips" and "Enable hover hints".

Thanks! I’ll try turning off “everything” and see how it goes.

— I am hoping to find some middle ground where I can still make use of some features. I’ll play around with it some more. I’d gotten discouraged by stack overflow discussion of similar issues where turning off various features wouldn’t stick.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#109

Post by ccordoba12 »

ajford wrote: post #105
ccordoba12 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. The variable explorer allows to check what variables you have declared and how they change with changes in your code. This is critical for scientific computing because you're constantly interacting with data (i.e. reading, cleaning, plotting and analyzing it), so having a dedicated pane for it is a great advantage.

I've found that people who aren't working on large data cubes or time series don't see as much value in variable explorers. Anyone who's dealt with huge data arrays appreciate it. Also, just wanna say Spyder looks like it's come a long way in the last decade. Congrats on some fine work! Spyder got me off Matlab nearly a decade ago. I had just learned Python and had trouble getting Matlab access in my lab (I was an un…

> Also, just wanna say Spyder looks like it's come a long way in the last decade. Congrats on some fine work!

Oh yeah, this is so true! Ten years ago, when I joined the project, it was just Pierre (Spyder's original author) and me. Then, in 2016, Anaconda gave us the resources to hire three developers part-time to work on the project, which was a huge boost (between 2012 and 2016 it was mostly me and three or four volunteers).

Now we have a team of five people working part or full time on Spyder, all hired by Quansight: https://www.quansight.com/

So you can expect lots more good things to come in the future.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#110

Post by _coveredInBees »

greatgoat420 wrote: post #81
refactor_master wrote: post #71

Eh, Streamlit and PyCharm is a much more powerful combination IMO. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about variable explorer always felt like training wheels to me.

Because it is super manly to guess at what the 20th element of an eigenvector is? Or you like super long printouts of data where it is hard to figure out what the index is? Matlab has one for a reason, and it is because very often you want a quick look at your often gigantic data.

Lol, that got a chuckle out of me. Yeah, it boggles my mind that someone would be disdainful of something as useful as a good variable viewer in an IDE. While it is certainly pretty essential when you are working with data or prototyping algorithms, I also do a lot of software engineering and library development in Python and I still find it *extremely* useful in Pycharm when prototyping code, and especially when debugging.

Like sure, I could drop into pdb and tediously work through printing things out (and good luck if you are printing out ndarrays or large dictionaries or wanting to look through instance variables for an instance in your local execution context) and take 4X longer to figure out why something isn't working, or just in a quick glance figure out exactly what the issue is. I guess I'll continue being a n00b developer happily relying on a variable explorer whenever available :o).

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