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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: 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.