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.
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 :)
This looks really nice! I currently use LiveCode (which isn't Python-based) for my daily "I have a bunch of data I'm looking to filter/transform/clean up" tasks. I'm always on the lookout for a similar tool, which for me means:
1. Text inputs (table/spreadsheet inputs?)
2. Text outputs
3. Buttons
4. Menus
5. Sliders
6. Checkboxes/radio buttons
And bonus points for:
7. bundle it up and give it to someone else to run
That's correct: 2, 3, and 5 are currently available. This initial set was intended as a minimal (albeit limited) set that demonstrates the UI capabilities. More widgets/controls (including the ones you've mentioned) are definitely coming.
7 is something I've considered (along the lines of a redistributable "Scripton runtime" that packages up the scripts and bundles a portable Python distribution). However, that's currently much further down on the todo list.
That is exciting news. I will check out Scripton in greater depth, and with the right set of interface widgets I would be in the heart of your target market.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I will be releasing hackerman.ai text editor later this year (or ASAP), also somewhat niche product with support for creating/editing lexers (eg for your own languages), able to customize almost everything, set key bindings to use self-defined functions (scripting), and ofc integrated AI features, which can also be customized and added as commands etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
* 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.
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.
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.
The vscode extensions path, unfortunately, would have been too restrictive for many of Scripton's features/technical requirements (tightly coupled REPL, minimal IPC overhead, ...)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> But that's not a GUI, that's notebooks. For Jupyter integration, TIL pyqtgraph has jupyter_rfb, Remote Frame Buffer: https://github.com/vispy/jupyter_rfb
I've had rerun bookmarked for a few years and this comment is enough to persuade me to finally try it out. Currently I resort to notebooks for simpler stuff and just spinning up a quick GUI for anything more, I've always found the middle-grounds just as much work as having my own UI and less powerful. Using frameworks like IMGUI, spinning up my own high-performance video and plotting was as simple as <100 lines of code, and also gives me a base of something which can be shipped to a client if neccessary.
> 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.
i found with aider if you do README.md with a halfway decent "spec" it will try to comply in architect or coder mode. I've been messing with it idly, and i will try this tack - give it the spec for the library or whatever.
someday, and i threaten this all the time, i am going to launch a website where i put all of these little "tricks" that make sense post hoc :-)
Rerun is exactly what we have been looking for years. A game engine for the visualisation of multidimensional data without all the game 3D knowledge. I have so many questions!
(Can I access a mmap file, display it in real time with rerun and save a history at the same time?)
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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!).
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.
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.
1. Perpetual fallback licenses on SaaS products are (unfortunately) not terribly common - so if it's not explicitly stated then you can bet your bottom dollar that it's highly unlikely.
2. From the dev themselves in another part of this post, "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".
> 1. Perpetual fallback licenses on SaaS products are (unfortunately) not terribly common - so if it's not explicitly stated then you can bet your bottom dollar that it's highly unlikely.
I also think perpetual fallback licenses are great and will def use this for hackerman.ai text editor (when released later this year).
I also wish devs would start offer one time payments again (especially for downloadable software).
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.
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.
PyCharm is much more sluggish. And I have had a lot more luck using dev containers in VSCode than PyCharm. In general, I find the process of getting an interpretter set up much nicer in VSCode.
Both work for Python syntax highlighting. But I've had several bugs in PyCharm that took several versions to get fixed. To be fair, individual extensions in VSCode can also have bugs, but I've generally found it easier to work around issues because it is less "bundled".
While I also felt limited in vscode compared to pycharm, it definitely feels more polished. I've had some bugs in pycharm for years with no progress on their issue tracker, and new features feel a bit slopilly implemented.
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.
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.
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 $20 / mo tool that saves you 30 minutes a month, cumulative, is already worth paying for. And this thing can save hours and hours a month for a particular kind of work.
Why is 20$/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.
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.
Agreed. The visualizations are very nice. I'd consider purchasing a copy for $150-$200 if it would give me one year of free updates, but I simply don't do subscription models without any kind of fallback license anymore.
I really dislike the idea of justifying eternal subscription cost models because of "ROI".
Every tool has an ROI, but you don't see photographers paying a monthly fee to use their camera, you don't see electricians paying a monthly fee to use their oscilloscope, you don't see carpenters paying a monthly fee to use their table saw, etc.
And this isn't Kickstarter - I'm not interested in investing in features/upgrades that the application might get at some point in the future, I buy software based on the feature set that it currently has.
I'm with you. I think, it will have to not just boost productivity, but it has to be an improvement over the cheaper, and very good PyCharm. Given the talking points on the home page and here, the visualizations will have to be worth it for a given use case to forego the introspection and refactoring capabilities of PyCharm.
Productivity is a very vague concept, which can't be measured easily in most cases. So it's also hard to justify a steep price. And it's not like there is no competition here. Visualizations aside, this IDE seems very generic and basic in what it offers. So chances are good that you would still use a better tool, to not lose productivity in other areas.
And most important, if you stop paying, you will lose the gain from it. If dev screws up at some point, you might lose the gain from it. It's not really clear how updates are working. Are you forced to always use the newest version? Or can you stay at a specific version for all time? This uncertain factors and other, demand that the gain from a subscription is so immense, that you are willing to take the risk. And this tool here is not there yet, maybe never will; making it hard to justify a sub.
> Absurd is people paying 80$+/month for yt tv so they can watch ads..
Youtube is an external service. You are paying for their running costs, which you create. This IDE is local, and there is no guarantee which updates will come and which benefits they will have for you. So there is no "running cost" you create for them.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
From what I can tell they went from having a dozen small dev tools into consolidating everything in VS Studio.
This has also been somewhat mitigated by VS Code, not everyone needs a giant 30GB ide to edit text. I think Microsoft is one of the better companies when it comes to developers. You don't even need Windows to compile Windows software... Unlike Apple that locks everything behind over priced hardware.
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.
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!
It is less so OP's tool, and more so the way they presented it.
I won't discourage them away from SWEs. Instead, I want to encourage them to sell to core engineers. I was a MechE for the longest time too. And this is a great Matlab alternative. In fact, I was exactly that MechE who was using HN to feel like a part of the tech community.
The top post is phrased as a sell. But, if I'd read it during my MechE days then it would've gone right over my head.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
This looks incredible, but I’m not a fan of the subscription pricing.
How about a hobbyist rate at least?
This looks really nice! I currently use LiveCode (which isn't Python-based) for my daily "I have a bunch of data I'm looking to filter/transform/clean up" tasks. I'm always on the lookout for a similar tool, which for me means:
And bonus points for: I think out of that list you have 2, 3, and 5? https://docs.scripton.dev/api/interact/user-interfaces/widge...Any chance you'll push further into the build-a-UI-to-muck-with-data realm?
Thanks!
That's correct: 2, 3, and 5 are currently available. This initial set was intended as a minimal (albeit limited) set that demonstrates the UI capabilities. More widgets/controls (including the ones you've mentioned) are definitely coming.
7 is something I've considered (along the lines of a redistributable "Scripton runtime" that packages up the scripts and bundles a portable Python distribution). However, that's currently much further down on the todo list.
That is exciting news. I will check out Scripton in greater depth, and with the right set of interface widgets I would be in the heart of your target market.
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
well, I didn't know I could use clerk with my IDE. Thanks for pointing that out!
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).
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.
This reminds me of Light Table from a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836978
As far as I'm concerned, the subscription model is an instant showstopper, just like web-based UIs.
Looks cool. A subscription to use it? Hard pass.
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.
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)
Do you plan on selling copies (vs only subscription)?
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.
How does Observable Plot work here? Do you translate the code to JavaScript?
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
This looks very nice!
How long have you been working on this?
I will be releasing hackerman.ai text editor later this year (or ASAP), also somewhat niche product with support for creating/editing lexers (eg for your own languages), able to customize almost everything, set key bindings to use self-defined functions (scripting), and ofc integrated AI features, which can also be customized and added as commands etc.
Built on top of Qt framework.
> And while notebooks are great for many things, they do make certain trade-offs that prevent them from being a full substitute.
Please elaborate on this. What are the tradeoffs?
I use VSCode and just add a magic comment #%% to split my Python script into cells and then I can run them as a notebook cell.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PyCharm does this well
more like SubScripton
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.
Kinde of like https://r-graph-gallery.com/ of rstudio?
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.
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!
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?
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.
Does anyone know the name of the typeface/font used in the example images?
Looks like JetBrains Mono.
I think that you are right, thanks!
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.
Freedom, not beer.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Very sleek UI.
Don't mind the subscription pricing -- keeps all parties aligned.
The UI toolkit is especially exciting, been looking for something to replace streamlit.
Thanks!
> 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?
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.
20$ is cheap for people actually need, it might be better to sell to manager levels while explaining ROI.
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.
Oh, this looks really grea... oh, it's another $20/m subscription...
why not go down vscode extension path?
The vscode extensions path, unfortunately, would have been too restrictive for many of Scripton's features/technical requirements (tightly coupled REPL, minimal IPC overhead, ...)
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.
whoa this is so cool!! Can you tell us a bit more about the C++ part? I don't get it
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.
make it a neovim plugin and I'll bite!
is this a AI editor like Cursor?
My personal wish: Linux version, please.
My advice: Get the [planned] Windows version to shipping asap. Best of luck :)
cool project :)
this is very cool!
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
From "Show HN: We open-sourced our [rpi CSV] compost monitoring tech" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42201207 :
Nagios, Collectd, [Prometheus], Grafana
From "Preview of Explore Logs, a new way to browse your logs without writing LogQL" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39981805 :
> Grafana supports SQL, PromQL, InfluxQL, and LogQL.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40164993 :
> But that's not a GUI, that's notebooks. For Jupyter integration, TIL pyqtgraph has jupyter_rfb, Remote Frame Buffer: https://github.com/vispy/jupyter_rfb
pyqtgraph: https://github.com/pyqtgraph/pyqtgraph
Matplotlib can generate GIF and WEBM (and .mp4) animations, but not realtime.
ManimCE might work in notebooks, but IDK about realtime
Genesis is fast enough by FPS for faster than realtime 3D with Python (LuisaRender) and a GPU: https://github.com/Genesis-Embodied-AI/Genesis
I've had rerun bookmarked for a few years and this comment is enough to persuade me to finally try it out. Currently I resort to notebooks for simpler stuff and just spinning up a quick GUI for anything more, I've always found the middle-grounds just as much work as having my own UI and less powerful. Using frameworks like IMGUI, spinning up my own high-performance video and plotting was as simple as <100 lines of code, and also gives me a base of something which can be shipped to a client if neccessary.
> 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.
i found with aider if you do README.md with a halfway decent "spec" it will try to comply in architect or coder mode. I've been messing with it idly, and i will try this tack - give it the spec for the library or whatever.
someday, and i threaten this all the time, i am going to launch a website where i put all of these little "tricks" that make sense post hoc :-)
Rerun is exactly what we have been looking for years. A game engine for the visualisation of multidimensional data without all the game 3D knowledge. I have so many questions!
(Can I access a mmap file, display it in real time with rerun and save a history at the same time?)
Wow I hadn't seen rerun before, this thing is amazing!
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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. https://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
Oracle RDBMS used to come with 20+ books, for PL/SQL, C bindings, Fortran etc etc... I don't want those days back!
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.
i have the minix book i am looking to do this with; the last time i read a book in this style was the TCP/IP book (the oversized wide one).
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!).
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.
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.
I think that's a good thing, developers not allowed to get away with partial job.
> perpetual fallback license
Are you sure this isn't what Scripton is offering? From the pricing page:
> All updates included while subscription is active
That doesn't preclude the idea that what stops when your subscription ends is the updates, not use at all. But I genuinely don't know either way.
Couple things.
1. Perpetual fallback licenses on SaaS products are (unfortunately) not terribly common - so if it's not explicitly stated then you can bet your bottom dollar that it's highly unlikely.
2. From the dev themselves in another part of this post, "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".
> 1. Perpetual fallback licenses on SaaS products are (unfortunately) not terribly common - so if it's not explicitly stated then you can bet your bottom dollar that it's highly unlikely.
I also think perpetual fallback licenses are great and will def use this for hackerman.ai text editor (when released later this year).
I also wish devs would start offer one time payments again (especially for downloadable software).
re: 2: yep, I see that comment now...
Techsmith does this as well and I love it. I'm still on a perfectly usable 5 year old version of Camtasia.
https://www.techsmith.com/
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.
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.
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.
I switched from VSCode to Pycharm a few years back. Both are very decent IDE's, but Pycharm feels to me more polished.
Pycharm is like driving an automatic, whereas VSCode feels like driving manual. It is a tradeoff as always, so ymmv.
> 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?
PyCharm is much more sluggish. And I have had a lot more luck using dev containers in VSCode than PyCharm. In general, I find the process of getting an interpretter set up much nicer in VSCode.
Both work for Python syntax highlighting. But I've had several bugs in PyCharm that took several versions to get fixed. To be fair, individual extensions in VSCode can also have bugs, but I've generally found it easier to work around issues because it is less "bundled".
While I also felt limited in vscode compared to pycharm, it definitely feels more polished. I've had some bugs in pycharm for years with no progress on their issue tracker, and new features feel a bit slopilly implemented.
Also the built-in type checker is just bad
I was interested, but Mac and subscription kill it for me. Good luck to them, though.
In a similar vein: https://www.spyder-ide.org/ (MIT-licensed)
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.
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.
What made you shift away from Spyder to Jupyter notebooks and VSCode?
Coding became my fulltime job and I organically moved to mature tools.
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.
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 $20 / mo tool that saves you 30 minutes a month, cumulative, is already worth paying for. And this thing can save hours and hours a month for a particular kind of work.
Do you think Cursor is charging too much for their VSCode fork? Many thousands of devs disagree with you…
Bad comparison because Cursor uses cloud-based large language models. This is running purely locally on your machine.
Why is 20$/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.
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.
Agreed. The visualizations are very nice. I'd consider purchasing a copy for $150-$200 if it would give me one year of free updates, but I simply don't do subscription models without any kind of fallback license anymore.
I really dislike the idea of justifying eternal subscription cost models because of "ROI".
Every tool has an ROI, but you don't see photographers paying a monthly fee to use their camera, you don't see electricians paying a monthly fee to use their oscilloscope, you don't see carpenters paying a monthly fee to use their table saw, etc.
And this isn't Kickstarter - I'm not interested in investing in features/upgrades that the application might get at some point in the future, I buy software based on the feature set that it currently has.
I'm with you. I think, it will have to not just boost productivity, but it has to be an improvement over the cheaper, and very good PyCharm. Given the talking points on the home page and here, the visualizations will have to be worth it for a given use case to forego the introspection and refactoring capabilities of PyCharm.
Productivity is a very vague concept, which can't be measured easily in most cases. So it's also hard to justify a steep price. And it's not like there is no competition here. Visualizations aside, this IDE seems very generic and basic in what it offers. So chances are good that you would still use a better tool, to not lose productivity in other areas.
And most important, if you stop paying, you will lose the gain from it. If dev screws up at some point, you might lose the gain from it. It's not really clear how updates are working. Are you forced to always use the newest version? Or can you stay at a specific version for all time? This uncertain factors and other, demand that the gain from a subscription is so immense, that you are willing to take the risk. And this tool here is not there yet, maybe never will; making it hard to justify a sub.
> Absurd is people paying 80$+/month for yt tv so they can watch ads..
Youtube is an external service. You are paying for their running costs, which you create. This IDE is local, and there is no guarantee which updates will come and which benefits they will have for you. So there is no "running cost" you create for them.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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_Microsof...
Was this tool superseded by Visual Studio ?
From what I can tell they went from having a dozen small dev tools into consolidating everything in VS Studio.
This has also been somewhat mitigated by VS Code, not everyone needs a giant 30GB ide to edit text. I think Microsoft is one of the better companies when it comes to developers. You don't even need Windows to compile Windows software... Unlike Apple that locks everything behind over priced hardware.
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.
This looks super useful. Thanks for sharing.
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
Thanks! GitHub Copilot support is actively under development.
You should look into Roo and offer subscribers some # of OpenRouter credits in exchange for subscribing
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.
Please don't try and box the user base of a web community. It's exclusive rather than inclusive. You have no idea who is reading these pages.
It is less so OP's tool, and more so the way they presented it.
I won't discourage them away from SWEs. Instead, I want to encourage them to sell to core engineers. I was a MechE for the longest time too. And this is a great Matlab alternative. In fact, I was exactly that MechE who was using HN to feel like a part of the tech community.
The top post is phrased as a sell. But, if I'd read it during my MechE days then it would've gone right over my head.
There are plenty of that type of person here on HN, we're not all engineers.
i.e. some of us are engineers in the traditional meaning.
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.
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.
Same for me, I would prefer a one off fee, or a subset of features for free. I like owning my tools though.
The price doesn't make sense in conjunction with PyCharm's pricing IMO.
Why is everything a subscription? This world is going nuts!
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.
wait a while and there will also be advertising every time you boot up and at random other times