[HN Gopher] Show HN: Scripton - Python IDE with built-in realtim...
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Show HN: Scripton - Python IDE with built-in realtime
visualizations
Hey HN, Scripton (https://scripton.dev) is a Python IDE built for
fast, interactive visualizations and exploratory programming --
without the constraints of notebooks. Why another Python IDE?
Scripton hopes to fill a gap in the Python development ecosystem by
being an IDE that: 1. Focuses on easy, fast, and interactive
visualizations (and exposes rich JS plotting libraries like
Observable Plot and Plotly directly to Python) 2. Provides a
tightly integrated REPL for rapid prototyping and exploration 3. Is
script-centric (as opposed to, say, notebook-style) A historical
detour for why these 3 features: Not so long ago (ok, well, maybe
over a decade ago...), the go-to environment for many researchers
in scientific fields would have been something like MATLAB.
Generating multiple simultaneous visualizations (potentially
dynamic) directly from your scripts, rapidly prototyping in the
REPL, all without giving up on writing regular scripts. Over time,
many switched over to Python but there wasn't an equivalent
environment offering similar capabilities. IPython/Jupyter
notebooks eventually became the de facto replacement. And while
notebooks are great for many things (indeed, it wasn't uncommon for
folks to switch between MATLAB and Mathematica Notebooks), they do
make certain trade-offs that prevent them from being a full
substitute. Inner workings: - Implemented in C++ (IDE <-> Python
IPC), Python, TypeScript (UI), WGSL (WebGPU-based visualizations)
- While the editor component is based off Monaco, the IDE is not a
vscode fork and was written from scratch. Happy to chat about the
trade-offs if anyone's interested - Uses a custom Python debugger
written from scratch (which enables features like visualizing
intermediate outputs while paused in the debugger) Scripton's
under active development (currently only available for macOS but
Linux and Windows support is planned). Would love for you to try it
out and share your thoughts! Since this is HN, I'm also happy to
chat about its internals.
Author : nightcraft
Score : 307 points
Date : 2025-02-18 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scripton.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (scripton.dev)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| This looks beautiful, I don't do data viz in Python so I don't
| have a use for this. I do mostly web dev in Python, but wow it
| looks amazing!
|
| I'm really surprised (and almost not) to hear the UI is in
| TypeScript, did you use a specific web framework like React by
| chance? The UI looks really nice to me.
| nightcraft wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| The initial prototype did use React, but the overhead in
| certain cases soon became an issue. It got replaced by a custom
| virtual dom implementation (coincidentally quite similar to
| Atom's Etch), but debugging complex updates remained an issue.
| Eventually, it ended up in a place quite similar to vscode: no
| frameworks and a handful of "core components" (eg: a
| virtualized list view)
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Can it visualize PyTorch Tensors without an additional memory
| copy? I.e. mapping it directly to a texture which is then
| displayed?
|
| I know this is not much of a concern on a system with unified
| memory (all recent apple computers).
| nightcraft wrote:
| Not yet. Some internal prototypes did try using IOSurfaces on
| macOS to go with the zero copy route, but there were a fair
| number of limitations.
|
| That said, the IPC minimizes copies and is actually fairly
| efficient at handling large numerical arrays.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Do you plan on selling copies (vs only subscription)?
| nightcraft wrote:
| The plan for now is just subscriptions.
|
| However, I would like to eventually have something like
| Jetbrains' "perpetual fallback license" where you can keep
| using up to a particular version after, say, a year of
| subscription.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| How does Observable Plot work here? Do you translate the code to
| JavaScript?
| nightcraft wrote:
| The scripton Python library internally transforms many common
| Python data formats (regular arrays and dicts, numpy arrays,
| data frames, ...) to an intermediate format. These are
| transferred to the IDE when you call the plotting functions,
| and then auto-translated into the JS equivalent.
|
| Your Python plotting code ends up looking like this:
| https://docs.scripton.dev/api/plot/orion/overview
| paddy_m wrote:
| What are your plans for a data table UI?
|
| Shameless plug: I created the open source Buckaroo table for
| jupyter (embeddable in other contexts) with histograms, summary
| stats, search... I love talking tables if you want to get in
| touch.
| nightcraft wrote:
| Coincidentally, one of the first components I wrote for
| Scripton was a virtualized table for handling million+ row
| dataframes with Tufte-esque inline visualizations (in a much
| evolved form, it currently backs the REPL).
|
| The data table got deferred to focus on the visualization bits
| for the initial release, but it's definitely planned!
| paddy_m wrote:
| Did you write your own table?
|
| Million+ row handling is nice. Once I figured out window
| based display of tables, documentation and a bunch of other
| pieces of architecture became simpler. Previously I sent the
| whole dataset or a sample of it.
|
| --
|
| Is Scripton user extendable? Do you expect
| ipywidgets/anywidgets based projects to plug in?
| nightcraft wrote:
| Yup, it was written from scratch. Yeah, having a flexible
| virtualized table certainly makes it easier to build more
| complex things on top (a lesson I initially learned from
| NSTableView/UITableView).
|
| Currently, it's not user extendable. While it does support
| some IPython features (eg: Python classes that implement
| IPython's rich outputs also work in Scripton), ipywidgets
| are currently not supported.
| matt1285 wrote:
| more like SubScripton
| pzo wrote:
| Looks beautiful so congratulation for the launch.
|
| Not sure if today this is enough though without any kind of AI
| chat assistant. Trae [0] is based on VSCode and Jetbrains Fleet
| are good looking as well. Visualization is definitely a big plus
| but there is also alternative like using rerun [1] and dearpygui
| [2] or some VSCode plugins (Python Image Preview, AREPL for
| Python)- might be hard to compete with those free alternatives on
| a subscription model IMHO but good luck!
|
| [0] https://trae.ai/
|
| [1] https://www.rerun.io/
|
| [2] https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui
| nightcraft wrote:
| Thanks! GitHub Copilot support is actively under development.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| You should look into Roo and offer subscribers some # of
| OpenRouter credits in exchange for subscribing
| erichocean wrote:
| If you want this in Clojure, check out Clerk. [0]
|
| As a bonus, you can continue to use whatever IDE you already use.
|
| [0] https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk
| roger_ wrote:
| This looks incredible, but I'm not a fan of the subscription
| pricing.
|
| How about a hobbyist rate at least?
| kaboomshebang wrote:
| What happens when I would stop my subscription? The scripton lib
| is open source and the lyra orion plot functions can output image
| files without refactoring? (Or do I have to reactivate my
| subscription?) (Congrats on your product launch btw :)
| whalesalad wrote:
| Does anyone know the name of the typeface/font used in the
| example images?
| sangeeth96 wrote:
| Looks like JetBrains Mono.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I think that you are right, thanks!
| ckastner wrote:
| In a similar vein: https://www.spyder-ide.org/ (MIT-licensed)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing.
|
| The OP posted a cool project, but 20$ a month for a nice VS
| code fork is absurd. Plus it's Mac only now.
| _blk wrote:
| Why is 20$/month absurd for something that boosts
| productivity? What does matlab coat nowadays? Sounds like
| he'd like to be able to improve it further and clients invest
| in that. Absurd is people paying 80$+/month for yt tv so they
| can watch ads.. My opinions.
| sneilan1 wrote:
| I don't want to pay $20/month for something that is
| probably going to be mostly unchanged after I purchase.
| That's like paying rent for tooling. I want to own my tools
| not rent them.
| vunderba wrote:
| Agreed. The visualizations are very nice. I'd consider
| purchasing a copy for $150-$200 if it would give me one
| year of free updates, but I simply don't do subscription
| models without any kind of fallback license anymore.
|
| I really dislike the idea of justifying eternal
| subscription cost models because of "ROI".
|
| _Every tool has an ROI_ , but you don't see
| photographers paying a monthly fee to use their camera,
| you don't see electricians paying a monthly fee to use
| their oscilloscope, you don't see carpenters paying a
| monthly fee to use their table saw, etc.
|
| And this isn't Kickstarter - I'm not interested in
| investing in features/upgrades that the application might
| get at some point in the future, I buy software based on
| the feature set that it currently has.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I'm with you. I think, it will have to not just boost
| productivity, but it has to be an improvement over the
| cheaper, and _very_ good PyCharm. Given the talking points
| on the home page and here, the visualizations will have to
| be worth it for a given use case to forego the
| introspection and refactoring capabilities of PyCharm.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Reasonable question but I think people are just burnt out
| by the Silicon Valley pricing model that has proliferated
| everywhere.
|
| * Most consumers now swallow a live service model and
| associated costs that they don't want
|
| * Most consumers now swallow the costs of west coast tech
| culture: cost of living, esoteric architectural choices,
| fad driven development, and hobby driven development
|
| * Most owners of software businesses expect to get rich in
| a relatively short time frame
|
| * Software is absurdly high margin if built effectively and
| distributed at (effectively) zero cost. Where do consumers
| ever see these savings when cost outpaces inflation?
|
| * Record profits and layoffs being recorded by the broader
| industry
|
| And specifically to the point of productivity tools
| inherently justifying nearly any price, this argument is
| fundamentally flawed because productivity is only
| measurable if it can be strictly defined and good luck with
| that one. Salespeople have made billions hawking that
| fallacy and people eat it up because American work culture
| fetishizes productivity.
|
| This isn't a critique of OP I really went down a rabbit
| hole exploring and appreciating this project and hope it
| succeeds.
|
| The underlying business model of software is dystopian when
| compared to what it could be if everyone didn't bind
| happiness to being cartoonishly wealthy in Menlo Park.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| This in particular looks like a solo project that
| probably took around a year.
|
| Say OP sells 1000 subscriptions. That's 20 thousand
| dollars a month. They sell 10k subs, 200k a month.
|
| Or the project fails, and as a closed source tool I can't
| fork and fix issues. The only options are it becoming a
| multi million dollar company or abandonware.
|
| I'd be open to it if it was 100$ with one year of free
| updates. But even then, I think Visual Studio( which is
| free for hobbyist) is the only closed source IDE I use.
| Everything else is open source and free.
|
| Maybe I've been traumatized by Unity 3D, but I don't want
| to use a bunch of closed source tools. What if this
| becomes my primary dev tool, and OP decides to update the
| pricing.
|
| If you're justification for a $20 subscription is that oh
| you're probably making six figures and this is making
| your job easier, then what's to stop you from pricing it
| at $50 a month. Why not a hundred .
|
| Open AI has already started this bizarre slide into
| higher pricing tiers, I can use Deepseek or LLma3 for
| free, but if I'm using the most up-to-date chat GPT, I'll
| run into a rate limit and be told it's time to upgrade to
| a $200 a month service?!
| hathawsh wrote:
| I wonder if this concern could be partly alleviated
| through a price lock-in strategy. There could be a
| contract that says because the subscriber has paid for N
| months, that subscriber is eligible to keep paying the
| same price for 5-10 years, regardless of the price for
| other subscribers. This could incentivize people to start
| their subscription early.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| That wouldn't stop the developer from abandoning the
| project though. I don't like using closed source tools
| when I can avoid it. Visual studio is a big exception
| because Microsoft will never abandon it in a million
| years, it's literally their flagship IDE.
|
| The same argument can be made for the jet brains IDEs.
| But a closed source tool made by a solo developer just
| seems too risky for me, even if the OP was giving it away
| I'd be a little bit reluctant to use it.
| hathawsh wrote:
| Makes sense. Still, I've been burned a bit when Microsoft
| surprisingly abandoned a developer tool I purchased.
| Flagship or not, a lot can change in a few years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Micro
| sof...
| vunderba wrote:
| Depends. MatLab's pricing structure is kind of all over the
| place.
|
| That being said, I purchased a copy for personal use almost
| 6 years ago for around ~200 USD and guess what? I just
| installed it on a fresh PC a few weeks ago, and it works
| perfectly. No subscription necessary.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| Do you think Cursor is charging too much for their VSCode
| fork? Many thousands of devs disagree with you...
| vunderba wrote:
| Bad comparison because Cursor uses cloud-based large
| language models. This is running purely locally on your
| machine.
| nine_k wrote:
| Depends on your ROI. If the tool saves you much more, $20/mo
| could be very reasonable. This IDE is rather narrowly focused
| on easily doing numerical code and visualizations. If you
| were doing it every day and were cringing every time at the
| thought of using your current setup, the product would be for
| you.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1205/ provides an idea of the cost of the
| time spent by improving a tool, or, equivalently, saved by
| paying for it. If you're paid even $50 an hour, a $20 / mo
| tool that saves you 30 minutes a month, cumulative, is
| already worth paying for. And this thing can save hours and
| hours a month for a particular kind of work.
| screye wrote:
| Spyder is the reason I could become Computer Scientist.
|
| When transitioning from MechE -> CS, every programming
| interface felt unintuitive and daunting to set up. Spyder made
| it so simple to get started. It turned python into a Matlab-
| esque numeric computing interface, got out of your way and let
| you built whatever you wanted. It reduced the 'time to magic'
| like no other tool I'd tried. (Can I coin the term : 'time to
| magic'?)
|
| If I had to setup PyCharm on day 1, I'd never have gone past
| the my first barrier. Before jupyter & colab, there was Spyder.
| It remained my trusty IDE for a full year until Jupyter
| notebooks & VsCode came around.
| nine_k wrote:
| Even though the term "time to magic" has already been coined,
| it think it's the key, pivotal, lynchpin thing. Making the
| time to magic short is what makes or breaks a product's
| adoption. Products with a very short time to magic win,
| despite whatever other technical flaws they may have: PHP,
| Twitter, and Docker are all great examples.
| dartharva wrote:
| What made you shift away from Spyder to Jupyter notebooks and
| VSCode?
| screye wrote:
| Coding became my fulltime job and I organically moved to
| mature tools.
| numb7rs wrote:
| Came looking for this comment. I was a heavy Matlab user,
| having learned it during University. I started getting
| frustrated with it though, and wanted something else that would
| let me go from simulation or experimental data to
| visualisations as fast as possible. Spyder was the answer.
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| I would've enjoyed trying this out but the subscription fee is an
| immediate turn off.
|
| My biggest concern with this project is expertise and potential
| burn-out. There's a lot of writing from scratch that really begs
| to go through the gauntlet of open source.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Fantastic product and props to the creator on it! Though Mac only
| and a subscription price of this magnitude for an IDE is a hard
| sell, given the availability of other options, which aren't
| neccesarily $20 a month worse. Never the less I'll keep my eye on
| this project.
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| why not go down vscode extension path?
| nightcraft wrote:
| The vscode extensions path, unfortunately, would have been too
| restrictive for many of Scripton's features/technical
| requirements (tightly coupled REPL, minimal IPC overhead, ...)
| bangaladore wrote:
| This is very frequently mentioned by people when they decide
| to fork vscode / build their own editor.
|
| Its not a huge deal here (in theory) as this is a python IDE.
| One of the biggest issues I've seen with other editor forks /
| whatever is some first party Microsoft extensions (dotnet
| iirc, cpp) will not function outside Microsoft's vscode
| release.
|
| Does your editor support vsix extensions? I assume no as you
| are just using monoco. Again, could be a dealbreaker for
| many.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| The price doesn't make sense in conjunction with PyCharm's
| pricing IMO.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Congratulations on your advertisement. I personally won't be
| paying to have free and open source software rented back to me as
| a monthly subscription, but I wish you the best of luck.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Freedom, not beer.
| Maelcum wrote:
| As far as I'm concerned, the subscription model is an instant
| showstopper, just like web-based UIs.
| screye wrote:
| OP, you're selling your tool to the wrong people. HN is not the
| crowd. This is for core-engineers who want to get value out of
| coding.
|
| Find people who pay the $1000/yr to use 1 tool in Matlab, and
| start pulling them away.
| lolinder wrote:
| There are plenty of that type of person here on HN, we're not
| all engineers.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| i.e. some of us are engineers in the traditional meaning.
| zwieback wrote:
| I wonder how many "traditional" engineers are Mac coders. I
| work at hp so not many Macs around but in our R&D and
| especially in manufacturing and test&measurement Mac-only
| would be a problem.
| alsodumb wrote:
| I am a robotics engineer/scientist and I do shit ton of
| visualization of all kind of high-fidelity/high-rate data, often
| in a streaming setting - time series at a few thousand Hz,
| RGB/depth images from multiple cameras, debugging my models by
| visualizing many layer outputs, every augmentation, etc.
|
| For a long time, I had my own observability suite - a messy
| library of python scripts that I use for visualizing data. I
| replaced all of them with rerun (https://rerun.io/) and if you
| are someone who think Scipton is exciting, you should def try
| rerun too!
|
| I use cursor/vscode for my development and add a line or two to
| my usual workflows in python, and rerun pops up in it's own
| window. It's a simple pip installable library, and just works.
| It's open source, and the founders run a very active forum too.
|
| Edit: One slightly related tid-bit that might be interesting to
| HN folks. rerun isn't that old, and is in active development,
| with some breaking changes and new features that come up every
| month. And it means that LLM are pretty bad at rerun code gen,
| beyond the simple boilerplate. Recently, it kind of made my life
| hell as all of my interns refuse to use docs and try using LLMs
| for rerun code generation and come to me with a messy code
| spaghetti. It's both sad and hilarious. To make my life easier, I
| asked rerun folks to create and host machine readable docs
| somewhere and they never got to it. So I just scrape their docs
| into a markdown file and ask my interns to paste the docs in
| their prompt before they query LLMs and it works like a charm
| now.
| rcpt wrote:
| For magnet levitation project I am dumping data to a csv on a
| rpi and then reading it over ssh onto matplotlib on my desktop.
| It works but it choppy. Probably because of the ssh.
|
| Could I drop rerun into this to improve my monitoring?
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/Y1LGSMFisDc
| alsodumb wrote:
| Yes! Rerun can definitely make your life a lot easier!
|
| Rerun natively supports the server and the viewer being on
| different devices
| (https://rerun.io/docs/reference/sdk/operating-modes). In
| your case, in the script you are dumping data into csv, I'd
| add the relevant lines to log data to rerun.
|
| On the desktop side, you can spawn a viewer that can listen
| to the stream and visualize it.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| I am impressed by the AI integration and simplicity of Data
| Formulator from Microsoft Research which runs one click in a
| Codespace so can't be much easier to get started throwing
| things together.
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/data-formulator
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Just a note: ReRun works out-of-the box for a number of uses,
| but I ended up switching to my own (simple, visualization-
| oriented) engine based on WGPU and EGUI (ReRun uses both of
| those as well), so I had better control over the camera,
| visualizations, snapshots etc.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Wow I hadn't seen rerun before, this thing is amazing!
| bsder wrote:
| > So I just scrape their docs into a markdown file and ask my
| interns to paste the docs in their prompt before they query
| LLMs and it works like a charm now.
|
| Huh. Nice hack. I may have to give that a try for some of the
| more obscure stuff I deal with.
|
| > Recently, it kind of made my life hell as all of my interns
| refuse to use docs and try using LLMs for rerun code generation
| and come to me with a messy code spaghetti. It's both sad and
| hilarious.
|
| I'm really agog at this. Do your interns understand that if
| they're just an LLM prompt injector, their job can be done by
| anybody? I haven't bumped into this yet, but I think your
| reaction was a lot more positive than mine would have been.
|
| I know that I certainly wouldn't be rehiring any interns that
| gave me that kind of grief.
| alsodumb wrote:
| I am not the hiring manager, and unfortunately a lot of
| interviews and hiring decisions happen at org level or at my
| manager level. These are mostly sophomores/juniors - folks
| who went through school in post-COVID, post-LLM era with a
| lot of virtual classes.
|
| I tried my best to explain it to them, and nudge them to
| using docs. I did live debugging sessions with them to try
| and 'teach' them how to use docs. Ultimately, it was taking
| away too much of my time for little to no return. I only
| started working in the industry like a month ago and it's my
| first time having interns that I didn't pick (back in school,
| I had undergad research assistants that I
| interviewed/selected, and they were all excellent) - still
| learning the ropes.
| uaksom wrote:
| Thanks for the shoutout!
|
| We did recently add an export for LLMs[1], but weren't quite
| confident in how the big models handled it. The biggest issue
| we kept running into was that it would prefer using older APIs
| over the latest ones. I tested it just now with ChatGPT, and it
| seems to be doing a lot better! The export is kept up-to-date
| with the latest contents of our docs, which update every
| release. Sometimes a bit more frequently, if we're doing drive-
| by doc fixes.
|
| For convenience, here's a GPT pre-loaded with the file:
| https://chatgpt.com/g/g-674702fde5948191a810bdf73370b6eb-rer...
|
| [1]: https://rerun.io/llms.txt
| helboi4 wrote:
| This looks really really cool but I do hate everything being
| subscriptions. Everyone trying to be a digital landlord out here.
| Just sell me something.
| resters wrote:
| this is very cool!
| nickserv wrote:
| I've been doing Python development for a long time, since when
| 2.4 was the hottest thing.
|
| I've used the language for all sorts of things: web apps, web
| APIs, GUI tools, image manipulation, data processing and
| visualization, some data science, machine learning more recently.
|
| I've used many IDEs over the years, currently on PyCharm.
|
| Just to qualify the feedback.
|
| Pros:
|
| - It looks very pretty.
|
| - Some nice time saving features.
|
| Cons:
|
| - Mac only.
|
| - Subscription business model.
|
| - Having to tie the code to the IDE.
|
| Any one of the con's would be a deal breaker for me.
|
| Overall I'm not sure what the target market is. Maybe I'm just
| too used to having free and/or libre tooling.
| lolinder wrote:
| > currently on PyCharm. ... Cons: Subscription business model.
| ... Any one of the con's would be a deal breaker for me.
|
| I'm curious to understand this better (as a fan of JetBrains):
| do you currently use PyCharm Community or does the JetBrains
| model not count as a subscription for you?
| vunderba wrote:
| Chiming in here, Jetbrains is a subscription model, but with
| a very important qualifier in the form of a _perpetual
| fallback license_ once you stop paying. It 's an important
| distinction, and I wish more businesses would follow this
| model.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Is the Jetbrain model basically the pricing model of early
| era (pre 2000s) IDEs? I remember back then developers had
| to pay for editors and compilers, which usually came with a
| huge amount of manuals. And then they could install patches
| until a new major version rolled out. I'm actually OK with
| that model, if they still ship manuals in paper.
| vunderba wrote:
| Yeah, I think it's pretty similar. I definitely remember
| purchasing copies of the software like Borland C++ /
| Visual Studio / etc. that would essentially cover the
| major version number and all patch related updates.
|
| Although personally, I don't know if jetbrains offers an
| actual physical copy (give me back the big box!).
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I love big boxes too! The manuals also show that
| developers really really know their products.
|
| It sucks that fast iteration is the new normal nowadays.
| It's not a bad thing if developers are eager to get their
| hands on a cutting edge feature, but I believe doing
| things slower but more thoroughly has its merit.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| No they did not show that. They showed that the project
| team for the tools included more than developers.
|
| It included qualified technical writers. It included
| project managers would would ensure that if somethiung
| was added there was a specification so that it could be
| documented.
|
| ie developers were not allowed to get away with only
| doing a partial job.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think that's a good thing, developers not allowed to
| get away with partial job.
| jamespo wrote:
| Oracle RDBMS used to come with 20+ books, for PL/SQL, C
| bindings, Fortran etc etc... I don't want those days
| back!
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I'd like to take a cup of coffee, take out one of those
| books (not super interested in Oracle TBH but could be
| some other low level stuffs) and read it through.
|
| OK I know reality is much less appealing than that. But I
| still prefer paper books than .CHM help files than really
| online documents.
| shagie wrote:
| Jetbrains originally had a "buy upgrade model". You paid
| full price for the first one, and then it was half price
| for upgrades beyond that.
|
| To Jetbrains, this had the problem of feast or famine and
| the non-predictable income. They'd need to release an
| upgrade when they needed money and they would hold off on
| releasing features as a minor release so that they could
| justify an upgrade later.
|
| At some point (I want to say 2014 based on my licensing),
| they trial ballooned a subscription only model and got
| some extreme pushback about it. With that feed/pushback
| Jetbrains went to the perpetual fallback and
| subscription. It addresses the subscription issue - they
| now have a revenue stream rather than the upgrade. It
| _also_ means that they do a lot of minor releases now
| with new features throughout the year.
|
| The other part of the perpetual fallback is that if you
| have a subscription to a version for a year, you will
| _always_ be able to use that version even if you cancel
| your subscription. If I canceled my subscription, I 'd be
| able to use IntelliJ 2024.2 forever. I'm currently
| running 2024.3.3
|
| One other bit on the subscription - it gets less
| expensive each year. I've got an all products pack for
| single user. My next yearly billing will be $173.00. http
| s://www.jetbrains.com/store/?section=personal&billing=ye.
| .. - the 3rd year and onwards (I've been a Jetbrains used
| since the end of the world sale -
| https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2012/12/20/jetbrains-end-
| of-... )
|
| https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
| gb/articles/207240845-What...
|
| Related from 2019:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798033
| lolinder wrote:
| Yeah, I was wondering if that was it. Practically it still
| ends up being a subscription for me because I actually do
| want the updates, but I guess that's the point--it's my
| choice to keep paying because I like what they're doing. If
| I stop liking I can stop paying.
| adamc wrote:
| Not the OP, but I have a subscription to PyCharm through work
| and still think it's inferior to VSCode. And I don't love
| vscode...
|
| In general, subscriptions are a high bar for me. You
| typically pay for them year after year but see minimal
| improvements. Back when I was doing Java development, I paid
| for my own copy of Idea just to get to use something good.
| But I don't think I would do that for a subscription.
| lolinder wrote:
| > I have a subscription to PyCharm through work and still
| think it's inferior to VSCode
|
| I'm trying to figure out how anyone could think that. Every
| time I switch to VS Code I feel hamstrung.
|
| What do you find to be inferior?
| nickserv wrote:
| I use PyCharm community edition for personal/OSS projects.
|
| At work I do have the all products pack since we support
| multiple programming languages for our client libraries and
| custom integrations.
|
| My only major complaint with jetbrains is having a separate
| IDE for .NET vs everything else.
| adamc wrote:
| I was interested, but Mac and subscription kill it for me. Good
| luck to them, though.
| mft_ wrote:
| Oh, this looks really grea... oh, it's another $20/m
| subscription...
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I wonder who are the target users. I do use a lot of Python but
| never had the need to plot outside of Notebooks. I guess anyone
| who plots a lot in Python? Maybe electronics engineers?
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| This reminds me of Light Table from a decade ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836978
| menelaus wrote:
| make it a neovim plugin and I'll bite!
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I like the idea, but it should be a separate product, not an IDE.
|
| Make it a Python runner with a visualization tool and independent
| from an IDE.
|
| You will not have to catch up with the big IDEs, no need to
| maintain the IDE code, you get people using different IDEs to
| adopt your products and they can keep their tooling.
| hakube wrote:
| Why is everything a subscription? This world is going nuts!
| zwieback wrote:
| wait a while and there will also be advertising every time you
| boot up and at random other times
| nomel wrote:
| Developers enjoy sustained income, and "worth", at least in a
| professional context (which tool developer who enjoy money will
| target), is _much_ more about value /time.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| This looks very nice. Good job shipping it!
|
| For me personally, though, it's a hard sell. Since I just paid my
| JetBrains renewal, I am currently very aware that I'm paying
| $173/year for *all* of their IDEs, and PyCharm Pro is very good.
|
| Just from looking through the site for this one, while it does
| some *SUPER* nice things, it doesn't replace everything I use
| from just PyCharm Pro, let alone from the other JetBrains tools
| that I also use and get in that subscription.
|
| So it costs more than my current subscription, and wouldn't let
| me replace it even if the Linux version suddenly shipped today.
|
| I love the competition in this space and wish you good luck. But,
| as someone who's obviously willing to pay for tools in this
| space, the only ways I could suggest that you could get my
| business would be:
|
| 1. Grow your feature set to the point that I could replace my
| JetBrains subscription with yours.
|
| 2. Become a JetBrains add-on, and reduce your price to something
| less than $10/mo.
|
| Both of those look like tough roads... I hope you succeed wildly,
| even so.
| nightcraft wrote:
| Thanks, appreciate the feedback!
|
| While the initial focus is on visualization capabilities, the
| missing IDE features are actively under development. Beyond
| cross-platform support, which PyCharm features would you
| consider essential and would like to see the most?
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| It's a long list. Most prominent lately, for me:
|
| * uv/poetry detection and environment use
|
| * refactoring
|
| * unittest/pytest support
|
| * docker compose service support (e.g. if I have a docker-
| compose.yml file in my project directory with redis and
| postgres services, pycharm lists the services in a UI and
| lets me start/stop/restart them easily from the IDE.)
|
| * django app/model detection and completion from those models
| as I'm building things that query them
|
| * "compound" runners, so I can start a npm watcher and a
| python watcher at the same time, and bounce them together as
| I iterate
|
| * The debugger is really, really good. And it's practically
| automatic to jump from the PyCharm debugger to the Clion
| debugger when I'm dealing with a python package that has C++
| modules.
|
| * django and jinja template support as I build out things
| that present my results.
|
| * ability to connect it to a data source and query/explore
| using sql directly against that, and see tabular results to
| help guide my other explorations
|
| * Vim emulation in the editor... IdeaVim is a really good vim
| implementation, and I find I hate working without vim
| movements and commands.
| decide1000 wrote:
| It looks nice but I like my Jetbrains. Why not integrate it?
|
| Also Mac only doesn't make sense for me. I use linux only.
| loic-sharma wrote:
| > While the editor component is based off Monaco, the IDE is not
| a vscode fork and was written from scratch.
|
| Interesting! What are the trade-offs here?
| nightcraft wrote:
| IMO, VSCode's codebase is excellent and quite well designed
| with most functionality abstracted out into injectable
| services. However, the interaction of these services and other
| bits of architecture do impose certain limitations that are
| tricky to workaround. One option is to fork vscode, write your
| own services, alter the architecture as necessary. You're then
| faced with keeping this in sync with the rapidly changing
| upstream code. Another alternative is to implement it as an
| extension, but that has a fair number of restrictions.
|
| For certain projects, forking/extending may be the right call.
| However, for the degree of customization required for Scripton,
| writing from scratch turned out to be the more viable path (vs
| attempting to workaround/rewrite yet another component in
| vscode). The trade off here, of course, is that you lose out on
| the familiarity and ecosystem that VSCode has built over nearly
| a decade. The hope is that Scripton remains sufficiently
| familiar (eg: Search / CMD+P / etc work similar to vscode)
| while being compelling enough in its own right.
| ei625 wrote:
| 20$ is cheap for people actually need, it might be better to sell
| to manager levels while explaining ROI.
| dinkblam wrote:
| Hold Command-Q to quit? Please don't do that! Shortcuts are meant
| to be pressed and not meant to be held for a second...
| nightcraft wrote:
| Some folks do like hold-to-quit to avoid accidentally quitting
| (similar to Chrome's default behavior). However, point taken -
| it'll be configurable in the next update.
| randomcatuser wrote:
| whoa this is so cool!! Can you tell us a bit more about the C++
| part? I don't get it
| nightcraft wrote:
| Thanks! The C++ bit comes in for the IPC (inter-process
| communication) between the IDE and Python.
|
| There are a few different ways for the Python process to
| communicate (send data over for visualization, receive/transmit
| commands, etc) with the IDE. For instance, you could
| communicate over HTTP. Depending on the use case, that can have
| an appreciable performance overhead. Instead, Scripton uses a
| lower-level mechanism with a protocol optimized for sending
| binary payloads (eg: large numpy arrays, images, etc). This
| communication and processing is implemented in C++ as a native
| multithreaded node module. It effectively enables very low
| latency and high throughput visualizations.
| levocardia wrote:
| But does it have a variable explorer? Somehow this simple
| feature, available in MATLAB and RStudio, is sorely lacking in
| many Python IDEs. I put up with an unbelievable amount of crap in
| Spyder because I can actually inspect dataframes, matrices, etc.
| alsodumb wrote:
| Vanilla vscode has some version of this in the debugging mode,
| you'd perhaps need to install their Python extensions but
| that's about it.
| nightcraft wrote:
| It does show you the active variables (and bits of details like
| shapes and dtypes for numpy arrays, torch tensors, dataframes,
| etc): https://scripton.dev/assets/images/lib-symbols@2x.png
|
| However, I'm assuming you want to drill down further into these
| (and have them displayed as a table for instance)? While the
| current version doesn't have that, it's definitely planned.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| PyCharm does this well
| daft_pink wrote:
| I find a lot of my pain points with python have to do with
| deployment. I'm going to try and study webassembly this year in
| the hopes that it will make it easier to deploy code without a
| server to an non-programmer end user.
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