Hey, I thought Iād posted on here before a while back, but since Iām more active on here again, I figured Iād introduce myself here.
Iām C.A.M. Gerlach, also a Spyder core dev, lead maintainer of the Spyder docs, website and theme, and co-maintainer of QtPy and some other support packages, among others. nowadays I actually donāt work as much on the Spyder core much, but help with UX, packaging, linter integration and CI/devops-related issues where I can.
For some background, like much of Spyderās primary audience but unlike most of the devs here, Iām actually a (satellite/ML-focused, NASA-funded atmospheric) scientist by trade, not formally educated as a programmer, and work on Spyder and a number of other open source projects on the side. I originally got involved in Spyder 4.5 years ago now (seems like yesterdayā¦), contemporaneously to learning and practically using Python, started out managing the issue tracker, then started contributing significant code, and later focused more on mentoring and PR review, finally moving on to my current maintainer/code reviewer and advisory responsibilities.
To emphasize a key point about Spyder, unlike most (all?) of the editors/IDEs here, it is written entirely in Python, for Python, which makes Python integration particularly straightforward, makes it easy for our users (who on average are less expert programmers than heavy duty software dev-focused IDEs) to contribute to development and has allowed us to rich help, interactive exploration, analysis, visualization and other tools for many years, with a small fraction of the financial resources or corporate support of other IDEs. On the other hand, this tight coupling has made our support for other languages much more limited; its certainly possible and some users have custom plugins and other tools that do so, but its not as well developed as alternatives.
Also, particularly important on the integration front, the Spyder team co-maintained python-language-server (pyls), but development mostly stalled out there and has since been basically unmaintained, with our own community-maintained python-lsp-server being the de-facto successor nowadays. We also are the maintainers of Jupyter QtConsole, which is integrated as Spyderās IPython console and can also be used standalone, and PyWinPty which backs Spyder-Terminal and other projects, as well as an ecosystem of first-party plugins.
Since I know there seems to be a death of it sometimes, if you ever want/need input from someone on the scientific Python side, feel free to ping me (or any of us); weāre certainly not authorities on scientific Python, but we can put you in touch with many of the most core luminaries and maintainers (Travis, Ralf, etc) as needed. Thanks!