Code Editors

What are code editors? Code editors are software programs that enable you to view, edit and sometimes run code snippets. These are different than basic text-editors like Microsoft Word because you only write basic text in word programs. The Microsoft Office suite uses advanced machine learning like natural language understanding to make grammatical suggestions that will help correct your errors in text, but that same logic doesn’t work for computer programming language. When you write computer programs there is a particular syntax that you should use. You might try to declare a variable but you forget to declare it before you use it, or you might create a function dependent on a library that you did not yet import. A code editor can help you recognize what the errors are that you have in your code and make recommendations for you to fix them.

• Microsoft word for code

What are my options? How do I choose a code editor? It depends on what you are trying to do. Many data scientists use Spyder which is part of the Anaconda package management software, and many software engineers use visual studio code, sublime, or atom. If you are working with virtual machines then you may have the option to use Nano, VIM or EMACS. The long story short is it really depends on what your needs are. Given that we are creating data science projects, we are going to use notebooks, specifically Jupyter notebooks. Jupyter notebooks are hosted workspaces where you can run python code in a cell and view the output of the code in the cell below the executed cell. For this course we are going to use Google Co-lab which is a free version of a Jupyter Notebook connected to your Google Account. It is relatively simple to run experiments in co-lab and produce meaningful visualizations in co-lab.

• This is interesting that co-lab is tied to my account. Also, I like the fact that everything is done and excecuted in one place.

Please review the co-lab documentation so that it is clear what we are using co-lab for:

Video - Getting started with co-laboratory

• It is pretty simple now that I understand how to use the terminal

What is co-lab? It is a Jupyter notebook. It helps me run code and write code while it reading the python and running the code.

Overview of colaboratory features The features make sense now. You can add files or import files, provide text and descriptions, and also code.

What is Jupyter? Jupyter notebooks is a way to store your data and interact with it