Sublime Text

WetGeek

DataDrake Microsoft aren't as evil as everyone seems to think

For sure. Much as I love Linux, I can't remember the last time a Microsoft update took my system out of service, if ever.

One of these days I may even pay the Apple Tax and get a Mac. I understand you can run Linux on those, once they got rid of Motorola and endorsed Intel.

n2o

DataDrake Not going into details here but I've had my (business related) dealings with them and can report with certainty that these people are evil and not a bit dumb. Still, always good to hear about more positive experiences 😁

DataDrake

n2o Oh no, MS can be exceedingly stupid. Especially then it comes to user support. I have plenty of war stories.

n2o

DataDrake Oh that. Yes. But that's only the people who work for the beast. This is a little OT but well... until Nadella took over, their products were (obviously) never built to be actually used for anything productive. They were built so they would have to be constantly and heavily supported - by the very people who, for that reason, went out and sold them.

The real blood-sucking happens in the larger hosts that have to use volume licensing. Those license agreements are carefully crafted legal bombs that can be used to extort money and have gag orders and further license agreements signed. It's basically impossible to get the licensing correct in larger volumes. "Correct" in that context means you get a (very expensive) piece of paper from KPMG that promises you freedom of legal worries for one year.

As CIOs started to dare with alternatives and this system started to show signs of decay, Ballmer was replaced with Nadella, who cleverly started to invest into real products. So are they still the same? I don't know. But I want no dealings with them.

DataDrake

n2o And again, I attribute licensing to stupidity. Every commercial software license I have ever dealt with is trash at some level, be that the software they use for the license server, handing out bad license files, providing awful support when either of those don't work, not knowing how to write license contracts, not knowing that their legal team has written a license which screws customers over and nets them hefty retainer bonuses, not firing the manager who hired the legal team and signed off on shitty license agreements, not firing the managers boss who should have known better than to hire that moron, not firing the manager who extorts customers to pad his annual bonus, etc. Microsoft isn't really any different than any other large company when it comes to their license agreements.

They all suck.

kyrios

To my experience, Microsoft support is rather good compared to other software editors. The material/assistance/follow up they provide is usually pretty good and their response time isn't bad. Of course being a very large company, I guess it shouldn't be hard to find people who had a bad experience with their support.

Support is usually problematic with vendors that covers niche market segments or with vendors that are growing very fast.

WetGeek

DataDrake Microsoft isn't really any different than any other large company when it comes to their license agreements.

And when's the last time any end user actually read an EULA?

n2o

DataDrake You are probably right with the scenarios you describe and that is probably part of the story. Part. I'll stop here because I don't want to sound like a tin foil hat person O:-)

In other news, I have used Sublime in the past and found it to be very nice. I think I only switched to SubEthaEdit (on the Mac) because regex search and replace was way faster and I used that a lot. But now that Atom indirectly comes from, well you know who, I do consider Sublime Text again.

paracetamol

WetGeek I don't read them, because here in the European Union they are not legally binding, so good luck to any company trying to enforce something not covered by or breaking rather strict EU's consumer laws.

WetGeek

paracetamol here in the European Union they are not legally binding

It's time that US lawmakers do the same. Many here don't believe it's lawful to require folks to give up their First Amendment rights in order to use something they've already paid for. Or to limit competition by requiring users not to compare benchmarks publicly. Or that a "contract" can be lawful without a signature.

WetGeek

n2o

Referring to learning Python: I originally bought Sublime because the Python Crash Course book I'm studying recommended it. I thought it was convenient that it was available for Windows and Linux, and its feature set looked pretty impressive. I'm at a point in my life when the cost wasn't a deal-breaker.

But by page 115 in the book, I was wondering why it kept pointing out errors in my code when I could find nothing wrong with it. It was very annoying. I'm new to Python, but I've spent many years writing C# code, so I'm not new to basic coding principles.

So, since I've had decades of using Visual Studio, I decided to try Visual Studio Code instead. I installed the Python debugger and every file I'd saved worked perfectly. Every time I pressed <F5> the examples ran to completion and produced the output I expected.

I'm no longer interested in why this happened. I just thought I'd mention it in case someone else has un-explainable issues with Sublime. I now wish I'd used it a while before paying for it!

WetGeek

WetGeek Sorry, I replied to the wrong message. This should refer to one from tomocafe . I haven't found a way in this forum to correct that kind of error.

paracetamol

WetGeek That's odd. I write Python for two decades give or take and am a user of Sublime for about a decade, and to this date I never had an un-explainable issues with that editor. I mean I am happy you found a tool that works for you, but the way you phrased your post gives an impression that Sublime is somehow faulty, which I don't think is fair given how solid that piece of software proved to be for all the years that I have been using it.

WetGeek

paracetamol I never had an un-explainable issues with that editor

It's had me very puzzled, too. I couldn't imagine how it could be used by so many folks without such issues being addressed already. Just as an example of the problems I've had, consider this line of code that accesses some items from a simple dictionary:

print(f"{person['first_name'].title()} {person['last_name'].title()} lives in {person['city'].title()}.")

Sublime just pointed to the closing quote and told me "syntax error." I spent two days trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Then I tried the same file in VScode. It ran without an issue. In another example where there actually was an error, VScode underlined the error and displayed a very reasonable error message.

I don't know if it could be a configuration issue, or whatever, but VScode seems like an old familiar friend to me. And I'm really diggin' Python, by the way. I can see why it's so popular for teaching beginners.

Justin

WetGeek You can edit a post provided nobody has responded to it. Use the three dots in the bottom right hand corner of a post.

paracetamol

WetGeek F-strings are a relatively recent addition to Python, only becoming available with Python 3.6. To older versions of the language f"something" looks like syntax error. It so happens that the default system Python in Solus is 2.7. Also Sublime comes with bundled version 3.3, which it uses as its scripting engine. I'm not sure how you ran your code, but my guess is you somehow did so using one of those older Pythons. Solus also comes with preinstalled Python 3.6 (and since the next update Python 3.7). Fixing the issue was likely as trivial as pointing to the desired version of the interpreter.

WetGeek

paracetamol F-strings are a relatively recent addition to Python

Thanks for solving that mystery!

Solus' python3 is 3.6.9, but it also has 2.7.16 installed. I'm sure that Sublime chose that one, and the syntax error(s) make perfect sense to me now. The book I'm studying uses F-strings throughout to display the results of its examples, which is why nothing seemed to work for me. It's good to know why. VScode apparently chose python3 for a default instead, which explains why everything just worked there.

That said, I'm still partial to Visual Studio. Like I said, it seems like an old friend. It's good to not have to learn a new IDE at the same time I'm learning a new language. I'm sure there's probably a way to change Sublime's default, but I'll still stick with VScode. I understand the value of having Python 2 installed, in order to run older code, but I don't see any advantage to learning version 2 to write new code.

So, a frustrating mystery solved, I learned something that I'll never forget, and I found my ideal Python IDE, even if it was by accident. This has been a good experience. Thanks for your help with it.

paracetamol

WetGeek I understand the value of having Python 2 installed, in order to run older code, but I don't see any advantage to learning version 2 to write new code.

Oh, you definitely shouldn't. Python 2.7 is about to reach its End Of Life with the final version to be released in April. It still lingers for legacy reasons, but Python 3 is the way forward.

DataDrake

paracetamol Python 2 is still used for eopkg and the Software Center. So yes, he should have it installed.

paracetamol

DataDrake I think there's a misunderstanding. @WetGeek was talking about learning Python 2. Unless you specifically plan to use your knowledge to maintain legacy code, training yourself to be proficient in Python 2 in the year 2020 is a waste of effort.

I'm not advising removal of system Python.

WetGeek

paracetamol I'm not advising removal of system Python.

Nor do I. Python 2.7 is installed by default, and just called python.

Python 3.6.9 is installed, and called python3.

DataDrake

paracetamol Ah, sorry, I was just skimming through.

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