SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Antidisestablishment
Programming language Python's popular extension for Visual Studio Code revamped
While Python has become the go-to language for data scientists and machine-learning applications, VS Code – Microsoft's lightweight code editor that works on Windows, macOS, and Linux – has become somewhat of a hit with developers, even within Google.
In 2016, a year after Microsoft open-sourced VS Code it had 500,000 developers using it. By November 2017, VS Code had 2.6 million developers using it each month, representing year-on-year growth of 160 percent.
In December 2018, Microsoft chief marketing officer Chris Capossela told ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley and fellow Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott that the "majority of Google developers are using it now".
The open-source Microsoft editor now has 4.5 million users and was ranked the most popular developer environment for two years running in Stack Overflow's global developer survey.
Meanwhile, Python has seen a huge and sustained rise in popularity among developers, who now ask more questions each month on Stack Overflow about it than JavaScript, which historically has attracted the most questions.
The updated Python extension fixes 84 issues and now includes a Variable Explore and a Data Viewer within the Python Interactive window. The new features were "highly requested" from users, according to Microsoft, and will allow developers and data scientists to view, inspect and filter variables in their apps.
So fellow Soylentils, has anyone tried this combination as a Python IDE and if so, what did you think?
(Score: 1) by sshelton76 on Thursday May 02 2019, @11:28AM (2 children)
Well just try running a python script in an environment it wasn't written on, such as going from 2.x to 3.x or missing some dep that was declared somewhere deep, deep down the rabbit hole and is now deprecated and/or gone.
Furthermore Python code is just hard to wrangle unless you're working with python every single day and have become accustomed to the quirks. Whoever decided that whitespace should be code needs to be hung by their toenails until the blood returns to their brain.
I started my professional career in C where I mostly was focused on taking existing single threaded apps and making them scale.
I have skills in Perl, PHP and Java. I've used Python, but I try to avoid it if I can. I have seen the language go downhill from feature bloat. I would still rather maintain a poorly written python app than a well written Perl app, but maybe that's just me.
JS has improved to the point where it's a reasonably competent language for many, many things especially if you need a quick and dirty UI. While you CAN import the entirety of npm and webpackify all of github, the fact is you don't have to in most cases.
What I like most about JS is that over the years they have taken the concerns of users into account. Compare the situation we have now with async/await vs callbacks or promises and you can see that there have been major improvements this past decade. Furthermore performance improvements under the hood mean that code written a decade ago still runs and in many cases runs much faster than it did back in the day. Example JQuery. Try running a 10 year old python app and see how that goes for you.
I still wouldn't use JS on the backend. Maybe it's just me, I've done my share of nodejs servers and have found golang to be superior in every way.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday May 02 2019, @12:27PM (1 child)
Thanks for the reply. It's interesting.
> Well just try running a python script in an environment it wasn't written on
I don't wrangle pure C so much and I never touched javascript but ever tried compiling with latest g++? Good luck.
> missing some dep that was declared somewhere deep, deep down the rabbit hole
How is this not a problem in any language? Dependencies are, well, dependencies. At least in python you get a reasonable import error. What about C - ever tried debugging linker errors? Good luck!
==
I note that JS misses ability to interface neatly with C code, which is a "killer app" for me:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14973224/javascript-communicate-with-c [stackoverflow.com]
I do scientific computing stuff; the ability to build a fast underlying library and then make a scriptable interface is super-powerful. In javascript I guess you need to interface via a web service or something?
(Score: 0) by sshelton76 on Thursday May 02 2019, @12:45PM
No, I wouldn't use a hammer to drive in a screw.
You want a fast, powerful, easy to use language intended for scripting your C app, use Lua.
https://www.lua.org/ [lua.org]
https://www.lua.org/pil/24.html [lua.org]
It blows python away in every use case I've ever seen.
Unless you specifically NEED something python only like numpy, there really isn't a good reason to use python at all for new projects.