Terminals and Environments

Why all this work?

Managing environments is one of the hardest parts of programming so, as instructors, we often design our courses around not having to do it. In this class, however, I’m choosing to take the risk and help you all through beginning to manage your own environments.

Note

We know that we don’t currently teach a lot of this in our department, so in Spring 22 I’m teaching a brand new course on Computer Systems, that will help you understand the underlying concepts that make all of this stuff make sense, instead of just following recipes and debugging here and there.

These issues will be the most painful in the course, I promise.

I think it’s worth this type of pain though, because all fo the code you ever run must run in some sort of environment. By giving you control, I’m hoping to increase your indepence as a programmer. This also means responsibility and some messy debugging, but I think this is a good tradeoff. This is an upper level (300+) level course, so increasing some complexity is expected and I want as much as possible to keep you close to realisitc programming environments; so that what you see in this course is directly, and immediately, applicable in real world contexts. You should be able to pick up data science side projects or an internship with ease after this course.

I know some of these things will be frustrating at times, but I want you to feel supported in that and know that your grade will not be blocked by you having environment issues, as long as you ask for help in a timely matter.

If, for example, you come to me in week 5 and have never got an any environment working and you’re trying for the first time, your grade will be hurt because you will be very far behind at that point. Ask for help early and often.

Windows

Windows has a sort of multiverse of terminal environments.

The least setup required involves using anaconda prompt and conda to manage you python environment and GitBash to work with git (and it can also do other bash related things).

Instead of managing two terminals, you may configure your path in GitBash to make Anaconda work

MacOS

MacOS has one terminal app, but it can run different shells.

On MacOS You may want to switch to bash (using the bash command or make it your default and update bash.