Jupyter Notebook Vs. Spyder IDE— Pros and Cons
Jupyter notebook was the first one to be introduced in our basic Python lessons and what I loved most about it is how neat you can make it look through the collapse option when using text cells.
Instead of seeing multiple cells of code like the one on the left, you can choose to expand only those you want to see and collapse those you don’t need. Also, if you look closely at the right side of the Code cell, there are arrows pointing up and down which allows you to move cells depending on your needs. There are also several other options you can choose from that will only affect the specific cell you want. I think this is best to use if you have lots of independent code and you want them organized. Jupyter notebook is also where I first created my trivia quiz and I can say that it was okay. Until I recreated it using Spyder IDE and I can immediately point out the difference.
I uploaded my trivia quiz (both using Jupyter and Spyder) here.
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As I mentioned in my previous blog, Spyder IDE has a variable explorer screen where you can see the variables you set and the values you assigned to them.
This was helpful to me in checking if the lengths of my lists are the same. However, my favorite thing upon using Spyder IDE in recreating my trivia quiz is how you can highlight a specific line of code, and run it independently from the rest of the code.
As I was checking my code, I realized that I wanted to edit a sentence in line 13. If the editing was made using Jupyter, I would need to rerun the code in the entire cell just to check the minor difference I added, but in Spyder, I only needed to rerun one line.
My final verdict, in the last Python project I made, I prefer using Spyder. However, Spyder does not have markdowns which I loooove about Jupyter because I love to see things (a.k.a. my code) neat and organized. In other cases like creating this notebook, I prefer using Jupyter.
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