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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 tra

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.

greatgoat420 6y ago
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.
- _coveredInBees 6y ago
  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).
ccordoba12 6y ago
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.
- ajford 6y ago
  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!
  - ccordoba12 6y ago
    > 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/ https://www.quansight.com/ So you can expect lots more good things to come in the future.
    - mkl 6y ago
      That's good news. Maybe you could let Quansight know their homepage is a bit broken (at least on Firefox on Android): The "READ MORE" link shows up on top of the text.
auxym 6y ago
The variable explorer comes from Matlab I think. It is handy to quickly and interactively check out what is going on in a matrix or ndarray, especially with the color coding.
dr_kiszonka 6y ago
PyCharm also have a variable explorer; one which I prefer over Spyder's :) >Eh, Streamlit and PyCharm is a much more powerful combination IMO. What is you PyCharm + Streamlit use case and workflow? Just curious because I have just learned about Streamlit from your comment.
- refactor_master 6y ago
  Basically that you can have a notebook-like workflow, without the cumbersome interface or unpredictable statefulness. And when you need to wrap it up for batch jobs, you can basically leave the code as is, since it can just take the widget default values in headless mode. Okay, so maybe a variable viewer isn’t a bad thing. I just know from personal experience that people get in the habit of scrolling through large arrays, instead of learning numpy’s slicing and shape concepts, or functions that detect e.g. the index of NaNs... I think that was mainly my point.

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.

greatgoat420 6y ago

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.

_coveredInBees 6y ago
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).

ccordoba12 6y ago

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.

ajford 6y ago
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!
- ccordoba12 6y ago
  > 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/ https://www.quansight.com/ So you can expect lots more good things to come in the future.
  - mkl 6y ago
    That's good news. Maybe you could let Quansight know their homepage is a bit broken (at least on Firefox on Android): The "READ MORE" link shows up on top of the text.

auxym 6y ago

The variable explorer comes from Matlab I think. It is handy to quickly and interactively check out what is going on in a matrix or ndarray, especially with the color coding.

dr_kiszonka 6y ago

PyCharm also have a variable explorer; one which I prefer over Spyder's :) >Eh, Streamlit and PyCharm is a much more powerful combination IMO. What is you PyCharm + Streamlit use case and workflow? Just curious because I have just learned about Streamlit from your comment.

refactor_master 6y ago
Basically that you can have a notebook-like workflow, without the cumbersome interface or unpredictable statefulness. And when you need to wrap it up for batch jobs, you can basically leave the code as is, since it can just take the widget default values in headless mode. Okay, so maybe a variable viewer isn’t a bad thing. I just know from personal experience that people get in the habit of scrolling through large arrays, instead of learning numpy’s slicing and shape concepts, or functions that detect e.g. the index of NaNs... I think that was mainly my point.