DataScience Workbook / 04. Development Environment / 1. Integrated & Interactive Development Environment (IDE)
Introduction
An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is an application for software development that includes a code editor, debugging tools, and version control system. These softwares are designed to make the process of writing, testing, and debugging code easier and more efficient. Rather than coding directly into a terminal or in a text file, it is usually better to use an IDE.
IDEs include many different tools that help developers code efficiently:
- Language support: specifically designed to support some programming languages
- Code editor: auto indentation, code completion, and syntax highlighting
- Debugging tools: identify and fix errors in the code
- Version control: track changes over time, collaborate
- Application testing and deployment
IDEs are essential tools for software development, provide one place to work on all aspects of a project, and have a wide range of features to streamline the development process. Some popular IDEs are Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, PyCharm, Jupyter, RStudio, Atom, and Spyder.
Further Reading
- 1.1 Visual Studio Code: Multi-language Integrated DE
- 2. Python programming environment(s)
- 3. R programming environment(s)