New to python, do I need an IDE or is vim still good enough?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 30 Dec 2012 09:30:10 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:

> Absolutely! Though it's roughly as good to have the current cursor
> position shown in a status line somewhere, and takes up less real
> estate. But yes, vital to be able to see that. Even when I'm sitting
> *right next to* my boss and communicating verbally, I'll talk about the
> code by quoting line numbers. "Let me explain. (No, there is too much.
> Let me sum up.) Pull up foobar dot jay ess and go to line 254-ish - see
> how the frobnosticator always gets called with a quuxed argument?"

I call shenanigans :-P

I don't expect that you keep in your head the line numbers (even the line 
numbers-ish) of interesting or pertinent features of your code, 
*especially* while the code is in active development and the line numbers 
are rapidly changing. I think it is far more likely that you keep 
function, class or method names in your head (after all, you are 
presumably reading and writing those names very often), and when you want 
to demonstrate some feature, you *first* look it up by higher-level 
object ("let's see the frob_quux function") to get the line number.

Assuming that your functions and methods are not obnoxiously huge, I 
think having a good class browser which lets you jump directly to 
functions or methods is *far* more useful than line numbers, in this 
context.


-- 
Steven