Incorporate VS Code guidance into the lesson material

[anenadic]

Rework the lesson material to use VS Code. Check that we have all the functionality available to us before the switch.

[anenadic]

What do the others think, should we make a push and switch to VSCode sooner (e.g. for the December release) rather than later? Your votes please @kkh451 @steve-crouch @bielsnohr @douglowe?

[anenadic]

From conversation with Steve 2023-11-09 - resources on using VS Code from SABS CDT:

Setup:
Once Ubuntu is installed, log in and open a command-line terminal. Install the required software via apt by typing in the following command:
sudo apt install -y python3-pip python3-venv python3-dev build-essential git
Then install VSCode using snap:
sudo snap install --classic code
Once VSCode has installed, run it and install the following extensions:

• Python (Microsoft)
• GitLens (optional)

IDEs: https://www.uhpc-training.co.uk/material/technology_and_tooling/ide/python
Testing (command line only): https://www.uhpc-training.co.uk/material/technology_and_tooling/testing/automated_testing
Scaling up: https://www.uhpc-training.co.uk/material/technology_and_tooling/testing/scaling_up
Debugging (and testing) both in vscode: https://www.uhpc-training.co.uk/material/technology_and_tooling/testing/diagnosing_issues

[bielsnohr]

My vote would be to not make this a priority for the December release. I need to find the data (think it is either the Python developer survey or Stackoverflow one) but PyCharm and VS Code are about equally popular for Python developers according to that. Where VS Code wins out is that it can be used for basically any language, and perhaps that is why we get more people requesting it.

Therefore, I think my preferred situation would be to have seamless selection of VS Code or PyCharm throughout the material. You see it on many websites where there is a tab/toggle at the top that switches certain portions of the content.

That might be a lot of overhead, but I think it will then cover a much broader reach of course participants. However, if we think the overhead is too much, that is understandable.

In my experience teaching, learners have been mostly fine looking at the "Extras" material when they need to figure out things for VS Code. We do occasionally get a few comments that it is a bit disruptive to need to switch frequently during the PyCharm heavy portions of the material, but that ends relatively quickly.

[anenadic]

My vote would be to not make this a priority for the December release. I need to find the data (think it is either the Python developer survey or Stackoverflow one) but PyCharm and VS Code are about equally popular for Python developers according to that. Where VS Code wins out is that it can be used for basically any language, and perhaps that is why we get more people requesting it.

Indeed - Steve and I were talking exactly about this - teaching the principles and not the tool and VS Code perhaps wins here.

Therefore, I think my preferred situation would be to have seamless selection of VS Code or PyCharm throughout the material. You see it on many websites where there is a tab/toggle at the top that switches certain portions of the content.

Also talked about that with Steve and what to do with the PyCharm version (do we split the repo, how to maintain, overheads of it all) - it would be ideal to be able to toggle but it is not easily doable in the current lesson format and definitely not for the December release.

That might be a lot of overhead, but I think it will then cover a much broader reach of course participants. However, if we think the overhead is too much, that is understandable.

In my experience teaching, learners have been mostly fine looking at the "Extras" material when they need to figure out things for VS Code. We do occasionally get a few comments that it is a bit disruptive to need to switch frequently during the PyCharm heavy portions of the material, but that ends relatively quickly.

Thank you for the feedback @bielsnohr - having some concrete usage numbers on PyCharm vs VS Code would be great (I have been mainly receiving requests for VS Code).

Latest update from 2023-11-09 is that Ann Gledson from Manchester and @douglowe's team has been looking into redoing the NERC version of the course using VS Code so we may get some effort from Ann - I said I'd be in touch with her and perhaps try and help her instead of both of us doing the same job. Will keep you all posted - this is definitely a big job and perhaps best left for the release after the December beta.

[bielsnohr]

This is the data I was referrring to:

It comes from the Python Developer Survey. VS Code marginally in more use.

However, the usage figures are more stark outside of Python, where VS Code is the clear favorite: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-technologies-integrated-development-environment

[anenadic]

That's great @bielsnohr - good to have some data to back up the decision, thank you.

[douglowe]

Interesting to see the numbers on IDE preferences :)

As Aleks has said - we are looking to move to VS Code for our course in March. I'm very happy for us to be guinea-pigs in the conversion of the material from pycharm to VS Code. I do like the suggestion of having tabbed sections where the use of each would differ - as long as these aren't too long. So it will be useful for decision making on this to see how much of a change we have to make to our course material to accomodate VS Code - that can guide us as to how we might want to approach it for the main course too.

[bielsnohr]

From a conversation with @douglowe in our maintainers' meeting today (2024-11-26):

• Discussed how to update the Earth Sciences version of the course with the original
• It was acknowledged that pulling the VS Code changes from Earth Sciences upstream to the original course would be advantageous to both sides
  • It would reduce conflicts for updating on the Earth Sciences side, and it would bring a popular requested feature to the upstream
• Vague steps:
  • Extract VS Code changes from @anenadic converted version of the Earth Sciences fork
  • Manually extract those into this upstream repo. Who wants to take that on?
  • Then, on Earth Sciences side decide how to deal with re-sychronising / updating

[bielsnohr]

From maintainers' meeting on 2025-01-28, it was acknowledged that it would be best if we can keep PyCharm while also including VS Code. The "split pane" functionality within the Workbench might make this a reality. The first step will be to see how time intensive it might be by trying it on a single episode, and there is a separate issue to track this: #421 . We have that as part of the upcoming June milestone, and it should enable to use to decide how we want to proceed with integrating VS Code.

As a consequence of this, I will be renaming this issue to indicate we are not ditching PyCharm, and I will remove the "good first issue" and "help wanted" tags, because this is no longer really the case.