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Who, What, Where, When, & Why PyCharm

If the only experience you have with coding is writing VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) in the VBE (Visual Basic Environment), then you would likely benefit from using another development environment to write Python. Fortunately, there are many to choose from, and my favorite is PyCharm. Here's a little information about it:

Who makes PyCharm?

PyCharm is made by the company JetBrains. They create tools for developers like yourself, and they do a great job at it. PyCharm in particular has a Professional Edition & a Community Edition. The Community Edition is open-source, kept up by the community, and is free to download and use, while the Professional Edition costs around $100-$200 per year.

What is PyCharm?

PyCharm is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), similar to the VBE, but comes with a lot more flexibility and functionality.

You have many options when it comes to writing code, with an IDE being one of the most comprehensive of them in terms of features. This also means it will take more time to learn how to use and more time to load up the program, but those are small trade offs in my opinion, as once you learn how to use it you will be very efficient. If you are working on an older computer however, the time to load may be a serious consideration for you, and you might want to look into something like Atom or Sublime.

Where can I get PyCharm?

PyCharm Community Edition can be downloaded for free here.

When will I know if PyCharm is right for me?

After you've tried out (or at least looked into) the other options, and picked which one is right for you. For the closest experience to the VBE, the IDEs to look into would be PyCharm or Visual Studio. But I will personally only be able to guide you through setting up and using PyCharm. In future articles I will go into some settings you can choose to bring an even more VBE-like experience to PyCharm.

Why should I get PyCharm?

You can get it if you want to, or not, find whatever tool is best for you, I have no personal stake in you choosing PyCharm over anything else. The reason I chose PyCharm when I was first starting is:

  1. I could get PyCharm Community Edition to look and act a lot like the VBE
  2. I liked that it was free and open source
  3. Visual Studio's Python tools did not exist yet