Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am moving PyCharm from Windows to Debian. Let’s get started!
The past month didn’t feel all that fast in terms of this project. I reread a few of my paragraphs from last month, and I get the feeling I didn’t have a clue about what I was looking at.
There are at least a couple reasons why I believe IDE’s are only for when you have an expert handy. They are full of stuff beginning programmers don’t need to be using yet and that stuff can be incredibly fragile. The moment something breaks, progress stops and you need someone familiar with the program to sort things out. If you’re engaging in self-study, working from the command line has fewer things to break and most language tutorials provide command by command instructions anyway. If possible, you should seek out one or more groups to join who can answer programming questions when they come up.
PyCharm was a little fussy to migrate to the new operating system. I made the mistake of just importing everything straight from the configuration on the old install. First of all, all the file paths were written in Windows. I tried routing the interpreter to the one that came with Linux, I had to move the link to my project file around, and I went hunting through the venv settings for references to Windows paths.
The easiest thing to do is to just say no to importing anything on first launch and recustomizing everything. I ended up moving looking into individual files in my settings and plucking out the ones with intrinsic ties to the old install. I had a lot of custom colorization going on, so I sifted through my settings files and plucked out anything with file paths starting with C:\.
Project files were a separate but parallel undertaking. With all the errors I kept getting, I ended up grafting my old project files into a new set of project files. Almost everything copied over, but a hidden .idea folder holds a lot of ties that rely on things not moving. I also had to remove a workspace.xml file or something similar over a reference to the old hard drive. Pycharm brought up a dialogue box to fill in the appropriate information and that angle was solved.
Now, about virtual environments. Implementing them is an important gesture toward seasoned programmers collaborating on projects on different computers, but they complicate things a bit much for the average novice on his or her own. On my windows install, I managed to hack it out of my project, but I never told PyCharm that I didn’t want to use them in a way it could understand. This time, however, I had help addressing the issue.
The IDE is a powerful tool. Powerful tools are okay to pick up and use, but the learning curve can be sharp, and reckless newbies can easily damage something while careful newbies just get slowed down by all the things to research. Supervision like what I used to get in my programming classes or what I’m getting now at Third Workshop is a practical must-have. I don’t always get the answer I’m looking for right away, but stray comments tend to provide seeds to plant in a search engine.
Final Question: Have you ever made a major change and had little cracks you didn’t anticipate?