Discussion: Which IDE to teach?

[lwjohnst86]

VS Code, only GitHub, only terminal, RStudio, Jupyter...?

[signekb]

@lwjohnst86
Since we're only focussing on Markdown (i.e., no R or Python), it might make sense to just use VSCode (instead of Rstudio)? We also have great experiences using VSCode, so why not?

I think that only terminal will be too technical (at least most people are a bit scared of the terminal in the beginning - and this should not be the focus of the course).

I have also considered only GitHub, but then learners would miss the local vs. remote repository part of Git, and I think that's a core part of collaborating using Git/GitHub too.

[lwjohnst86]

I also thought of GitHub only, but yea, that local vs remote no longer becomes part of it. Could be a thing to consider though, since I don't know if VS Code would be a good choice either, even though I like it. But really depends on what other assumptions we make of the learners.

[signekb]

Very true. I'll park this for now until #29 is more fleshed out.

[lwjohnst86]

OOOOOOO, you know what, maybe VS Code would be a good choice, because you can actually use VS Code directly INSIDE GitHub!! https://github.dev/github/dev

[lwjohnst86]

Reduces the barrier even more, since we won't have to get them to install anything 😛

[signekb]

😮😮😮😮 HOW NICE!

[signekb]

But wont that also skip learning about local vs remote repos (at least in practice)?

[lwjohnst86]

VS Code might be the best general tool to use for teaching, especially since we don't know what our intended audiences programming tools (if they have one) are. So I think a local install (the GitHub dev as a backup) is a good choice.

[signekb]

Agreed 👍

[signekb]

@lwjohnst86 Do we feel like we have made a decision on this now (i.e., this issue can be closed)?

[lwjohnst86]

Yes, I think so 😁 Eventually I'd like to have a decision post like we do in Seedcase, but I need to setup the repo for that first. And it's low priority.

[signekb]

@lwjohnst86 Do you mean a repo for rostools (i.e., generally for all courses) or for this specific course?

[lwjohnst86]

Yea, like another repo ☺️