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Meeting agenda 2019 05 09

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Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher edited this page May 28, 2019 · 1 revision
  • Time: 10:00-10:45 Eastern on 2019-05-09
  • Moderator: Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher

Attendance

  • Greg Wilson
  • Joel Ostblom
  • Elizabeth Wickes
  • Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher

Minutes

  1. Proposal: have a single IDE for beginner Python that we use throughout the book

  • Passed

  • Pros:

    • consistency with R version
    • less confusing and removes ambiguity and choice for new people
    • allows helpful IDE features to be introduced immediately

  • Cons:

    • not everyone will agree on the which IDE is best (includes book users)
    • if instructors want to use a different IDE, it’s a bit harder for them
    • as IDEs evolve (and popularity changes), book content may become more and more outdated.

  • Notes:

    • Greg: many or most instructors will not feel confident choosing a tool, this will put extra unnecessary pressure on them. Instructors may also be novices.
    • Elizabeth: future-proofing: there will be two types of instructors: novices who want explicit instructions, and instructors who will have local influences that they need to adapt to. We can ride this line: provide good descriptive IDE-specific instructions, but also choose an IDE such that the features we highlight are future-proof. Write instructions so that an instructor could still adapt.
  1. Proposal: take Jupyter off the table

  • Passed

  • Pros:

    • Jupyter doesn’t play nice with Git (even nbdime and reviewnb)
    • problematic to use with novices sometimes

  • Cons:

    • we love Jupyter :(
    • it’s very popular

  • Notes:

    • Elizabeth: chunk the code in the book, say in appendix or sidebar that you should run those chunks as cells in Jupyter.
    • Joel: how do you teach things like writing notes about plots as they come? Elizabeth: point out capabilities of Jupyter, and advise on how to do it in scripting version.
    • We can revisit this later – we should definitely still talk about Jupyter a lot in the book. Joel volunteers to passionately write a Jupyter appendix.
  1. Which IDE should we use?
  • Top choices are Spyder and PyCharm
  • Spyder pros:
    • cell-based execution
    • comes with Anaconda: don’t have to download an extra thing, takes up less space
    • students who try it for the first time don’t mind it (from Elizabeth's assignments)
    • similar to Matlab and Rstudio
  • Spyder cons:
    • resource intensive, uses a lot of RAM
  • PyCharm pros:
    • students like it
    • it's an industry standard IDE
  • PyCharm cons:
    • tricky to connect with Python - EW: "it's a 30-minute adventure to install PyCharm and Anaconda"
  • We should recommend a cloud-based IDE for people who have installation failures or last-minute issues (i.e. Repl.it)
  • Include notes and appendix with reasons why you'd want to differ from the core recommendation and choose a different IDE.
  • Passed: Spyder is the final choice
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