4 ms·

I'm a seasoned developer, so this is not for me, but I am impressed. Especially the distinction between "ValueID" and "Value" that's a good way of explaining it

I'm a seasoned developer, so this is not for me, but I am impressed. Especially the distinction between "ValueID" and "Value" that's a good way of explaining it to beginners, and a common source of error for junior software developers. My only two bits of constructive feedback would be: 1. F5 is unnatural on a Mac. Should be something like ^r (and ^R) or similar. 2. The interface looks very, um, VisualBasic or Microsoft Excel. That is fine. There is certainly a market for that. But it will turn off a huge segment of your market, namely those that aspire to be the lead in the TV show Mr. Robot. You may get some traction reskinning this whole thing to make it more slick like a machine gun you hide under your trench coat like in the Matrix and putting up a separate website or webpage and seeing which version gets more downloads. Either way, I love this!

_dain_ 4y ago
>The interface looks very, um, VisualBasic or Microsoft Excel. That is fine. There is certainly a market for that. But it will turn off a huge segment of your market, namely those that aspire to be the lead in the TV show Mr. Robot. I know that this is meant kind of in jest, but do younger people really have much opinion one way or another about computer UIs? There's so much UI fragmentation on the modern Windows desktop, the aggregate effect is an aesthetic mess no matter what you do.
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  Yes. I have been looked at with a certain amount of envy by youngsters with my "hacker looking" linux terminal at full screen typing like a madman on a train or in a cafe. Kids are influenced by movies and they want to be cool and powerful.
- tzekid 4y ago
  Yes and no. There's a large segment of students who are not 100% passionate about programming in itself and follow what looks and feels nice over what's practical. But that's their los IMO.
- DrewADesign 4y ago
  Yes, they do, and it has nothing to do with purposeless decoration or pretending to be a leet haxor as others implied. To even moderately experienced developers, a UI is a tool we use to interact with an application. To everyone else, the UI is the application. We developers need to develop an novice-level understanding of many things we touch but don't specialize in... Perhaps the domain we're developing software for, or networking, or database work. We also tend to get the classic novice overconfidence in those topics because we've never needed to know as much as the experts and therefore have never encountered problems we weren't qualified to solve... or so we think. UI design is one of those things. I'm an art school educated UI designer, have done significant work in serious graphic design, and worked for a decade as a full-time back-end web developer for a reputable organization. The number of developers that have tried to explain UI design to me, even knowing my background, is astonishing. I'm male, but it looks exactly like mansplaining by my estimation. UI design is a profession totally separate from software development and graphic design because making a good UI is a totally different process than either of those things– it's more akin to industrial design. Most developers don't understand its importance, and vastly overestimate their ability to create and evaluate interfaces themselves. I contribute code to open source projects all the time... but trying to contribute design work is a miserable experience. This is the reason independent open source alternatives will remain alternatives and never become standards. I take supporting evidence from IDE market shares. All of the top results are either commercial software or mostly controlled by companies that have staff UI designers. The one org that controls a top contender that didn't seem to employ a dedicated UI designer is Eclipse, which is famous for its usability... Just not in a good way.
  - sublinear 4y ago
    > UI design is a profession totally separate from software development > ... trying to contribute design work is a miserable experience. This is the reason independent open source alternatives will remain alternatives and never become standards. These statements contradict each other and show how design is not separate from at least some aspects of software development (frontend application development). Most open source projects may leave the GUI as an afterthought or not even provide one. It makes all the sense in the world to separate the frontend from the backend especially if the goal is standardization. You might want to try your hand at frontend dev after working for so long on the backend. The discipline sorely needs people who understand both design and backend. You sound like you'd do very well.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
(I just want to reskin their application icon.) I've used Thonny on the Raspberry Pi and find a few things frustrating about it. The only other Python IDE I've used is PyCharm on the Mac. I prefer PyCharm but where Thonny feels a little too bare-boned, PyCharm has too much going on for this newbie.
- ghostpepper 4y ago
  It would be really cool if there was an editor where the UI started out incredibly bare and progressively added panels/buttons/etc as you used the corresponding python features for the first time.
  - farisjarrah 4y ago
    Thonny actually does this on the basic raspberry pi install. It launches into a basic mode with big tablet like buttons and then you can click "Advanced Mode" and it goes to a more normal Windows experience with drop down windows and more options. On a personal note, i've found thonny to be the easiest way to get started with raspberry pi pico development. You just plug your pico in, fire up thonny and select the Micropython interpreter and you are now live coding on a rp2040 microcontroller. It can even download the fresh U2F image to your pico. It is a very good/simple user experience.
- footlose_3815 4y ago
  Pycharm does just about everything I've wanted, and keeps adding more features.
BeefWellington 4y ago
I'm a seasoned developer, so this is not for me, but I am impressed. This kind of take always shows up in threads about simpler tools and it always amazes me. This reads to me as "I'm a seasoned developer, so I'm too good for this." I'm not sure what you consider seasoned as I've only be developing software for 25 years but one day I hope to achieve these lofty heights. namely those that aspire to be the lead in the TV show Mr. Robot I work with loads of hackers who avoid "real IDEs" like the plague. I think you vastly misunderstand that crowd.
- hsfzxjy 4y ago
  I think he means Thonny is good for freshman who learns by some toy examples, but far from a handy tool for projects of medium or large scale, which a "seasoned" developer would likely build.
cormacrelf 4y ago
New programmers can have their dark background when they’ve coded for long enough hours at night with a light background. It’s earned.
- screature2 4y ago
  When enough blood, sweat, dirt, and grime builds up on the IDE to paint it black. More seriously, I see some plugins for reskinning to dark themes https://thonny.org/#plugins https://thonny.org/#plugins (e.g. https://github.com/ranelpadon/thonny-onedark/ https://github.com/ranelpadon/thonny-onedark/) Maybe that's a feature? You know you're getting into the swing of things when you start customizing your IDE.

_dain_ 4y ago

>The interface looks very, um, VisualBasic or Microsoft Excel. That is fine. There is certainly a market for that. But it will turn off a huge segment of your market, namely those that aspire to be the lead in the TV show Mr. Robot. I know that this is meant kind of in jest, but do younger people really have much opinion one way or another about computer UIs? There's so much UI fragmentation on the modern Windows desktop, the aggregate effect is an aesthetic mess no matter what you do.

3pt14159 4y ago
Yes. I have been looked at with a certain amount of envy by youngsters with my "hacker looking" linux terminal at full screen typing like a madman on a train or in a cafe. Kids are influenced by movies and they want to be cool and powerful.
tzekid 4y ago
Yes and no. There's a large segment of students who are not 100% passionate about programming in itself and follow what looks and feels nice over what's practical. But that's their los IMO.
DrewADesign 4y ago
Yes, they do, and it has nothing to do with purposeless decoration or pretending to be a leet haxor as others implied. To even moderately experienced developers, a UI is a tool we use to interact with an application. To everyone else, the UI is the application. We developers need to develop an novice-level understanding of many things we touch but don't specialize in... Perhaps the domain we're developing software for, or networking, or database work. We also tend to get the classic novice overconfidence in those topics because we've never needed to know as much as the experts and therefore have never encountered problems we weren't qualified to solve... or so we think. UI design is one of those things. I'm an art school educated UI designer, have done significant work in serious graphic design, and worked for a decade as a full-time back-end web developer for a reputable organization. The number of developers that have tried to explain UI design to me, even knowing my background, is astonishing. I'm male, but it looks exactly like mansplaining by my estimation. UI design is a profession totally separate from software development and graphic design because making a good UI is a totally different process than either of those things– it's more akin to industrial design. Most developers don't understand its importance, and vastly overestimate their ability to create and evaluate interfaces themselves. I contribute code to open source projects all the time... but trying to contribute design work is a miserable experience. This is the reason independent open source alternatives will remain alternatives and never become standards. I take supporting evidence from IDE market shares. All of the top results are either commercial software or mostly controlled by companies that have staff UI designers. The one org that controls a top contender that didn't seem to employ a dedicated UI designer is Eclipse, which is famous for its usability... Just not in a good way.
- sublinear 4y ago
  > UI design is a profession totally separate from software development > ... trying to contribute design work is a miserable experience. This is the reason independent open source alternatives will remain alternatives and never become standards. These statements contradict each other and show how design is not separate from at least some aspects of software development (frontend application development). Most open source projects may leave the GUI as an afterthought or not even provide one. It makes all the sense in the world to separate the frontend from the backend especially if the goal is standardization. You might want to try your hand at frontend dev after working for so long on the backend. The discipline sorely needs people who understand both design and backend. You sound like you'd do very well.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

(I just want to reskin their application icon.) I've used Thonny on the Raspberry Pi and find a few things frustrating about it. The only other Python IDE I've used is PyCharm on the Mac. I prefer PyCharm but where Thonny feels a little too bare-boned, PyCharm has too much going on for this newbie.

ghostpepper 4y ago
It would be really cool if there was an editor where the UI started out incredibly bare and progressively added panels/buttons/etc as you used the corresponding python features for the first time.
- farisjarrah 4y ago
  Thonny actually does this on the basic raspberry pi install. It launches into a basic mode with big tablet like buttons and then you can click "Advanced Mode" and it goes to a more normal Windows experience with drop down windows and more options. On a personal note, i've found thonny to be the easiest way to get started with raspberry pi pico development. You just plug your pico in, fire up thonny and select the Micropython interpreter and you are now live coding on a rp2040 microcontroller. It can even download the fresh U2F image to your pico. It is a very good/simple user experience.
footlose_3815 4y ago
Pycharm does just about everything I've wanted, and keeps adding more features.

BeefWellington 4y ago

I'm a seasoned developer, so this is not for me, but I am impressed. This kind of take always shows up in threads about simpler tools and it always amazes me. This reads to me as "I'm a seasoned developer, so I'm too good for this." I'm not sure what you consider seasoned as I've only be developing software for 25 years but one day I hope to achieve these lofty heights. namely those that aspire to be the lead in the TV show Mr. Robot I work with loads of hackers who avoid "real IDEs" like the plague. I think you vastly misunderstand that crowd.

hsfzxjy 4y ago
I think he means Thonny is good for freshman who learns by some toy examples, but far from a handy tool for projects of medium or large scale, which a "seasoned" developer would likely build.

cormacrelf 4y ago

New programmers can have their dark background when they’ve coded for long enough hours at night with a light background. It’s earned.

screature2 4y ago
When enough blood, sweat, dirt, and grime builds up on the IDE to paint it black. More seriously, I see some plugins for reskinning to dark themes https://thonny.org/#plugins https://thonny.org/#plugins (e.g. https://github.com/ranelpadon/thonny-onedark/ https://github.com/ranelpadon/thonny-onedark/) Maybe that's a feature? You know you're getting into the swing of things when you start customizing your IDE.