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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 01 2019, @03:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-microsoft! dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 1) by sshelton76 on Thursday May 02 2019, @01:22PM (2 children)

    by sshelton76 (7978) on Thursday May 02 2019, @01:22PM (#837840)

    Well if you look at barebones vanilla JS from years ago and compare it to modern versions, it is much easier to work with.
    Classes, async/await, big arrow functions, proper variable scoping with let, a proper foreach style construction that you can break out of.
    There's been a lot of improvements that just make the JS of today a lot easier to work with than the JS of yore.

    I'm not saying it's the best language ever. I'm just saying it amazes me that it has gotten so much better over the years while python appears to be getting objectively worse.

    The performance of python has taken a dip. There seems to compatibility issues every time I try to rely on someone else's python script to do anything and don't get me started on the mess that became of stackless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stackless_Python [wikipedia.org]

    I'm sure there are people who will disagree with me. I also am very aware that there are a lot of system level apps written in it, and appearantly netflix swears by it too...
    https://www.zdnet.com/article/netflix-python-programming-language-is-behind-every-film-you-stream/ [zdnet.com]

    However, from my perspective I have yet to find a use case where Python is the hands down best choice for the job. There seem to always be better, more performant options and the only reason I would use Python at work is if I had a lot of programmers who were proficient with Python and couldn't adapt to better tech easily. Which is what I think Netflix is actually saying in the article I linked.

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday May 02 2019, @03:43PM (1 child)

    by RamiK (1813) on Thursday May 02 2019, @03:43PM (#837923)

    Classes, async/await, big arrow functions, proper variable scoping with let, a proper foreach style construction that you can break out of.

    You're right contemporary JS compares favorably to its previous self when considering those. But even to python new and old, it's really awful due to the ad-hoc nature of how those features and new syntax were added on as the language grow.

    However, from my perspective I have yet to find a use case where Python is the hands down best choice for the job.

    I think python's charm was that it was a good enough solution for almost everything right about until it started accumulating more and more features and paradigms. Now you have a language that takes twice as long to learn and use and different fields use different feature-sets like in C++ (only not nearly as bad). So, you can never just start doing what you want to do and instead have to effectively learn frameworks and relearn language features since they only come up in limited use cases.

    That is, it was never the best use case for anything. But it was time efficient and easy to prototype in. Now it's got quite cumbersome.

    Best analogy is Swiss Army knives: The simple ones are good to have around for odd jobs. They're rarely compare favorably to dedicated tools. But when you need to unscrew something or what not they're there in your wallet/pocket. But those new huge combo knives are horrible! The grip is uncomfortable for almost all the tools. They're too heavy and bulky to keep in a pocket even if you're wearing cargo pants. The individual tools are just too small and fragile... A mess. Of course, in this context JS would be those tiny sporks that you have to grab the knife end to use the fork and modern JS would be someone adding in a foldable third T junction for you right down the middle of the spork so now you can grab that instead but the join is shit so it keeps loosening up and spilling soup all over you... Go btw, would be one of those brand tool sets that has almost everything you need except the odd specialist tool. And I guess for completeness C is a lathe letting you build whichever horror you'd like while C++ is a cheap bench drill converted into a CNC mill that could on paper do anything but generally ends up broken.

    --
    compiling...
    • (Score: 1) by sshelton76 on Thursday May 02 2019, @03:52PM

      by sshelton76 (7978) on Thursday May 02 2019, @03:52PM (#837931)

      Excellent reply and your assessment of C++ matches my own.
      C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
      C++ loads the gun and pulls the trigger for you.