Given I’ve only just started using the IDE after years of using IDLE, exclusively, I’m guessing it is ‘older’ because it only has Python 3.8 and looks to be from 2023. As for Anaconda, it won’t do me a lot of good since I’m not in any production group and have never collaborated on a project, All I do is tinker with small procedural code.
Presently I’m a little hesitant to jump over to the CLI or get really dug-in. The goal is to get more familiar with the way things work on the site and keep myself interested in practice exercises and upgrading my knowledge base of concepts, idioms, best practice, etc. Working on my own machine feels very isolated, which is something I am very used to so kind of like to work on a site just to feel less so.
Thank you for all your advice. I promise to follow up as time progresses. One should also note, I’m still on an old Windows 10 box which has about a year to go before support disappears and I’d like to stick with it as long as the machine will hang in (2015 motherboard). It got a new solid state drive, memory and power supply about three years ago. On that basis I’ve kept installs to a minimum and avoid panic as much as possible. As one ages, the confidence wanes and anxiety goes up, at least for me, anyway. My grand kids can run circles around me.
The most current version of Spyder is 5.5.5, so your version is just fine. As is using Python 3.8 – unless, of course you’d like to use newer language features (new in Python 3.9, new in Python 3.10, new in Python 3.11) locally.
Our online editor supports Python 3.11.5.
And that is totally fine! Although you might be misunderstanding how the CLI works. Once something is downloaded, you can work on it locally and run tests locally - but you can then upload code back to the website to iterate on and get mentoring. It doesn’t have to be all one or all the other.
I often work locally if I am trying to work out something more complicated, or I’m troubleshooting something that requires more than using print() statements. Once I get a working solution cobbled together, I will then upload it to the site and iterate on it.
In any case, if at some point you need to run tests locally, the test files are available in GitHub for each exercise. For example, Perfect Numbers.
I feel you. I am nursing along an intel mac that is almost at the edge of not being undateable. But as long as it wants to turn on and run code, I’m good.
And I’d love to hear your progress and thoughts on the track. Have fun, and happy coding!
