are there recommended programming environments for beginners?

[Martin R]

As I am preparing my first ever sage days, I was trying to figure out what to recommend to new users.  My alter ego tells me that emacs is perhaps not the first choice for users coming from Mathematica on MS Windows.

Doing my research I stumbled over

https://github.com/sagemath/sage/issues/30500

which concludes with, essentially, "Maybe this is better done on the wiki, and the wiki should have a summary page pointing to a page for each IDE or text editor."

However, I could not find any such wiki page.  Instead, I found https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/developer/workspace.html#text-editors-and-ides-for-use-with-sage, which seems to promote the to me unknown https://www.gitpod.io

I'd be very interested in experiences you have made!

Best wishes,

Martin

[Nils Bruin]

If you're really targeting beginners, I'd say jupyterlab notebooks. One step up: put your code in a separate file and load/import it all through the jupyterlab environment. It comes with a text editor.

Ideally, you'd have a jupyterhub deployment available so that your participants can start without having to install anything on their own computer.

[Dima Pasechnik]

Nowadays a popular tool is VSCode, and it has a decent integration
with Sage, thanks mainly to efforts of Tobias Diez (in CC, not sure if
he reads this list).
Perhaps he can comment.

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[Tobia...@gmx.de]

As with many such choices, the decision is subjective. However, I highly recommend VS Code. It starts as a lightweight editor but can become quite powerful as you explore its features further.

For the workshop, you might find Codespaces particularly useful. This feature allows you to edit and run Sage code directly in VS Code, either in the browser or locally, without needing to install anything. It’s free for up to 60 hours, which should be more than sufficient for the duration of the workshop.
Get started with Codespaces here. If you can persuade one of the Sage admins to spend $2, they can activate prebuilds. With this enabled the Sage environment starts immediately, rather than requiring a few minutes for building (https://github.com/sagemath/sage/issues/36978).

[Dima Pasechnik]

Hi,
we can certainly afford to spend $2 (per month?) to activate prebuilds
in Codespaces.
Someone who has enough Sage foo should activate these, and I'll get
them reimbursed from our donations stash.

Dima

On Wed, Jan 8, 2025 at 9:25 AM 'Tobia...@gmx.de' via sage-devel

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