[anyfoo]

> Finally, try to avoid using an IDE. This keeps your files and folders structures simple and organized out of necessity.

A good IDE will keep that structure simple and organized, too. The problem with python is more that its dynamic, duck typing type system hinders some of the great benefits that "modern" (as in, from the past ~2 decades) IDEs bring. Since the IDE can hardly infer any type, and since even the ones it could infer can dynamically change in shape at any time, the IDE cannot provide as helpful suggestions and as powerful navigation as IDEs for other languages can.

For the same reason, compile time almost exclusively tells you about crass syntax errors only, which further diminishes an IDE's helpfulness.

I'd be curious to know if there are python IDEs who integrate with mypy (or the underlying static typing PEP) to bring some of the lost magic back to python IDEs.

[tablarasa]

> "Since the IDE can hardly infer any type, and since even the ones it could infer can dynamically change in shape at any time, the IDE cannot provide as helpful suggestions and as powerful navigation as IDEs for other languages can."

I've felt this pain a lot. I finally took the time to learn how to make use of the type hinting that python does offer, and now I write those type hints without even thinking about it. It makes the development experience so much better for me and across the team, since we've all bought in. It doesn't do everything. It is kind of lipstick on a pig. But it's worth doing.

[throwaway2037]

About using type annotations in Python: Do you get any push back from your team? I do. "Oh, it clutters the code." I don't know how to reply. And, they continue to write complex code without type annotations. It is hard to reason about. It is a never ending battle with people who come from weaker typed language. They struggle to see the value of stricter types.

[tablarasa]

Sure, a little bit. It is a change in peoples' workflows after all, and a lot of developers are pretty choosy about that. But I think you can overcome that if you make a respectful case.

I think you are spot on that people coming from weakly typed languages often don't realize what they're missing. "It clutters the code" is really just "I'm not used to seeing it that way" so if you can get people to try it out (maybe in a well-cordoned area of the code base or in some new dev) they will find out for themselves that it saves time and grief in the end.

[throwaway2037]

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, your strategy has not worked for me. The mostly Python people are me continue view types as a burden, not a benefit.

[Aperocky]

I feel a similar way about typescript. It outsource the mental complexity into compile stage instead of directly on runtime.

[tablarasa]

100% yeah totally agree, I feel very similarly about TS (and can barely stand vanilla JS at this point)

[nick-of-time]

Pycharm does, and so does any other jetbrains IDE with their python plugin installed. It's a large part of the reason I bother putting type annotations in my code, to help my IDE help me.

[anyfoo]

Good to know, thanks! I've warmed up to python again when I discovered mypy, having successfully used it for a personal project with rather complicated types (async and thus futures were involved, over more basic types but with complicated shapes). Knowing that there is also adequate IDE support makes it even more of a candidate again...

[Aperocky]

Personally, without considering languages, I think IDE subconsciously cause complexity and increase entropy for a project. When things are at the a single key jump it's easy to insert code wherever and eventually build a jumbled mess. I've seen this in too many projects. Going without IDE causes a short term pain but eventually the organization gets there and it speeds up because the code is simply better organized and where to look for things are either imprinted or self evident.

[anyfoo]

That may work for small projects[1], but for large projects you quickly run into a limit where manual navigation and lookup become very prohibitive to one's ability to efficiently write code.

Even then I'd rather avoid cumbersome navigation and typing (the fingers on keyboard kind this time, not the type system kind), as well as catching a lot of problems only in the compile step (if existing) in the best case, or at runtime in the worst case (common in python without static typing extensions).

[1] Or, I guess, projects with a small team, where all members are familiar with all or most of the code base.

[Aperocky]

My opinion is manual navigation is O(log(N)) for well organized projects. Which scales very well - especially as the package should be optimized for local changes/split into dependencies when it gets above a certain size. For a project that's not organized at all, it's O(N) which means it will soon become untenable.

Most project is somewhere in between but from what I've seen it tends towards the latter. As there are overwhelming amount of people utilizing the ease of IDE and do not care at all about the structure, or maintenance of the structure of a package.

[anyfoo]

I'm talking about pretty large projects. Try navigating, for example, an operating system kernel for its very many functions you encounter just when writing a device driver. You won't know where to find everything (most things maybe even), so manual navigation is certainly not O(log(N)).

Unless you want to mindlessly click through directory structures and files hunting for vague hints, what are you going to do? Full text search? Unless you're both careful and lucky, you will find a lot or all of the call sites as well. Which, again, gets worse the larger the project (and thus the number of call sites) gets.

Then, you better remember the arguments' type, order, and significance of the many functions you call, otherwise it's back to the navigation I've described above every time you want to use it.

This was one of the more extreme examples, but the whole problem starts to rear its ugly head pretty early in much smaller projects. The issue is however somewhat masked if you are the only or one of very few developers with high familiarity of the project. Of course then you know which file to click on and where to scroll to.

But then, even on a small project, that project rarely exists in a vacuum (the OS kernel example above is actually almost somewhat of an exception). You will use other frameworks and libraries, at the very least the language's standard library, usually, which is effectively a big project again.

[Aperocky]

> what are you going to do? Full text search?

Actually yes, I often have a grep tab open on the next terminal tab (whereas vim lives in the other one). Granted, I don't use it nearly as often as one would CTRL-B in intellij. grep (and other GNU utilities) is very powerful and can be used for more than just text searches. In fact for even project I develop using intellij I often find myself doing the same grep window in remote just because it's faster and I can make manual edits on the fly.

For navigation, I usually to tabe or vert sb and this allow the other call signature to simply exist on my desktop real estate or a gt away until I don't need it anymore.

You might feel like I'm simply proving your point, and you might just be right. But I do use the same method of editing on larger project outside of personal space, and delivers at speed if not just due to the fact that I need very minimal setup (the context switching is hefty when the package space is littered with various packages and not just a single one that you change all the time). I do use IDE for certain languages (yes, java), but I think it has more to deal with the verbosity and inherited complexity (chicken and egg here) then I would attribute to size alone.

The bottom line is, having been using IDE and not IDE for different projects for a long time, I would default to not using IDE if I could. It's not like I'm pathologically averse to the idea of IDE, in fact I use it daily. I just think not using the IDE has benefits both on speed for certain projects, and clarity and skill growth for others.

[icedchai]

I still have nightmares of a previous job where there was a “god” module with a single file containing dozens of classes, many similarly named, over 7000 lines long.

[wombatpm]

Pycharm does a good job