This provides a measure of isolation, so that updating a Python package for one project doesn’t impact other projects” source. > “When installing Python packages it’s typically a good practice to isolate them within a Python environment (a named Python installation that exists for a specific project or purpose). This is what the developers of reticulate suggest:
Maybe that is an exaggeration and it only looks like that for a beginner, but every Python programmer I asked had at least a couple of problems installing packages (while this is relatively rare with R).Ĭonsequently, the Python community seems to be moving towards a workaround (instead of fixing this poor state of affairs), which consists of installing Python and the corresponding library of packages into a separate folder for each project, called a “virtual environment”. Unlike in R, installing and managing packages in Python is a flaming pile of garbage. So here I wanted to quickly share what I’ve learned venturing into Python using RStudio, reticulate and R Markdown.
The good news is: the great people over at RStudio solved both these problems at some point during the last years and I only noticed now. Whenever I set up doing a Python course, I struggled with incompatible packages, my IDE or pip grabbing the wrong version of Python or both.Īt one point I nuked my entire Linux installation and had to format my drive all because I wanted to install spaCy. I could never really wrap my head around installing and updating Python packages. That’s what you look at the entire time while programming! Most Python users I met seem to think IDEs are not really important, which confuses me even further. I tried a few different ones including Spyder and Jupyter Notebook (not technically an IDE) and compared to RStudio and R Markdown they felt rather limited. I never really found an IDE that I liked. The language itself seems simple enough to learn but as someone who has only ever used R (and a bit of Stata), there were two things that held me back: I have tried to venture into Python several times over the years.
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