My older son and I are both working through online videos teaching machine learning with python. All of the materials we have seen use Jupyter Notebooks. For those of you unfamiliar with Jupyter Notebooks, they are freaking awesome. At least they are when they work. We were using two laptops because he'll be returning to San Francisco in a few days and needs to take his working environment with him. He had been using Anaconda while I was using Visual Studio Code. He discovered that cut/paste of code does not work in his Jupyter Notebook so, since he also has VS Code installed, he decided to create a notebook using that.
Problem number one - there was no option to open a new Jupyter Notebook. In fact, even when I sent him my notebook file it only opened as an XML file.
Solution number one - google the problem. Many of the solutions consisted of "make sure you have the right extensions and the right versions installed.
Problem number two - no explanation of what the correct extension versions are, how to check the current versions, or how to get and install/update the correct versions.
Solution number two - uninstall VS Code (and Visual Studio) and re-install the same version that works on my laptop.
Problem number three - every app seems to want to install its own python.exe and there were twelve (minimum) copies on his laptop, and VS Code seemed determined to use python 3.8.
Solution number three - we downloaded and installed Python 3.11. Then we had to manually edit the system PATH variable to ensure that the ...\python311 and ...\python311\scripts (for pip) were above any other entries that contained a python.exe. we were unable to reset the interpreter version for a current notebook so we had to start from scratch.
So after two hours of fighting and cursing we were finally able to get VS Code to use the 3.11 python.
Jupyter Notebooks are awesome.
When they work.
