Sad that Atom will be abandoned, Juno is awesome (great work on that). When will that happen? Presumably you will have VScode featured up beforehand?
For me, the workspace is essential, inline evaluation is great, what would be super awesome would be a way to delete all variables in the workspace without having to quit Julia. And undockable segments of the IDE is always nice.
The comment below about making it like RStudio Julia friendly is a good idea, but really, its just as good to have those features in an IDE. It doesn’t have to be RStudio.
Great work on Juno btw, if it could be painlessly transferred over to VSCode, I’d be super happy.
Another nice thing to have is test coverage visualization. In Juno I guess this could use the same engine that draws the time duration of each line of code in the profiler.
I miss plots that attach within the IDE. Currently, plots appear in a detached window and when a new plot is generated, there is no history of the previous plot.
If it has to move, it has to move. I do not know how the move will impact the current functionalities we have in Atom. I am entirely ignorant whether the way the IDE looks like depends basically upon Juno or on Atom. The console is excellent, the easy way we can customize the panes is terrific, and it’s effortless to move around across the different panes (by the way, if we could have the possibility to see different plots in the plots pane, that would be great).
I am not a programmer; I use Julia to solve problems in my field (macroeconomics). So I may be of little help on the software side of the problem. But my teaching experience may be helpful regarding your inquiry about the migration into VSCode. I taught a macroeconomics course to master students, for around 20 years, using Matlab. The students used to accept the challenge (their first encounter with numerical computation), but most were not very excited about it. In the previous semester, I used Julia (Atom + Jupyter) for the first time, and the students just loved it. I am not sure why. Maybe, because it was easy to install everything, maybe because it was easy to write down simple routines and check the output in the plot’s pane, or the run-cell and the output popping out and easily seen, perhaps because of the dark theme, and the highlighted colors syntax. Even undergrads were excited when I showed them how I had conceived the problem sets they were solving by hand and a calculator.
If we want to have Julia adopted by a massive number of people, we need to have an IDE with the output easily seen, flexible, and appealing … to the beginners. I may be wrong, but I think most Python users are still using Spyder, despite the existence of PyCharm and VSCode.
I’m just trying to help. I belong to the vast majority of people in the world of programming (clumsy programmers), but Julia needs them because they are quite abundant.
vscode not actually FLOSS? See: VSCodium. There are no dates on web sites so I don’t know whether this is still relevant or even if it matters.
I just love the way Juno/Atom is at the moment. Simple to use, easy to learn. I’ve never had a problem with git and Julia so the tight integration of github (Microsoft) and vscode (Microsoft) isn’t a big deal. Since vscode is build on Electron (like Atom), surely it doesn’t matter much that Atom PRs are infrequent.
Well, as mentioned I’m a kind of clumsy programmer. So I am sure you have a point regarding Spyder.
But when I migrated from Matlab, I experimented with both Python (Spyder and PyCharm) and Julia (Atom). I decided to stick with Julia for three reasons: speed, syntax, and Atom. For a newcomer, I think Atom is more appealing than Spyder. You have everything at hand: REPL, Console, in-line output, Workspace, Plots pane, Documentation, Debugger, Welcome Guide, etc. I am aware that there is a recent version of Spider that has new improvements, but the one available 17 months ago did not look better than Atom; I should stress, for a newcomer like me, and for the level of knowledge I have about programming in general.
Few years ago, when the Spyder Dev Team announced they will allow general API for supporting other languages I thought it would be great to see Julia support.
I really like Spyder IDE. It is not as polished as the Visual Studio IDE / JetBrain’s IDE’s / MATLAB. But it still decent.
I tried VSCode again recently, and here’s what I was missing:
Working with cells is inconvenient:
No shortcuts for navigating between cells
Cell being copied to REPL causes unnecessary clutter
No command to evaluate cell without moving to the next
No visual indication of cell end, and no highlighting of current cell (I think Juno’s highlighting is also a bit too subtle)
It would be nice to have something like MATLAB’s “Increment value and run section”. On the other hand Interact support would provide similar functionality.
Displaying Interact.jl output in the plot pane
Progress bar. Ideally the same progress bar package should work in both Juno and VSCode.
I actually find the IDE to be MATLAB’s strong point. Although a lot of “traditional” IDE stuff is not so good (like searching), I find it really convenient for numerical computing. Very responsive, multiple plots which are interactive and can be docked and undocked, cell support is good, (small) arrays can be viewed and edited in an Excel-like interface. The file explorer on the left that changes the working directory as you navigate it is also really convenient. All of these would be very nice to have in a Julia IDE as far as I’m concerned.
Of course, some features are worthwhile in the Matlab IDE. Working with cells is one of those. But, personally I find the live script unbearably slow and unresponsive.
Sometimes I have a lot of objects like nested Dicts in my workspace, so variable inspection would be wonderful!
And Alt+Enter isn’t working for me in VSCode, but that’s a problem on my end.
All in all the combination Julia+VSCode+remote editing is not working very stable for me.
