WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:02.860 One of the questions I often ask at the end of the show is, 00:00:02.860 --> 00:00:06.000 when you write some Python code, what editor do you use? 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:09.620 Increasingly, the most common answer is Visual Studio Code. 00:00:09.620 --> 00:00:14.320 Despite its Windows-only namesake, Visual Studio Code is cross-platform 00:00:14.320 --> 00:00:17.200 and has been gaining a lot of traction in the Python space. 00:00:17.200 --> 00:00:21.180 I was at the Microsoft Build conference immediately after PyCon this May. 00:00:21.180 --> 00:00:25.000 There I got a chance to sit down with Dan Taylor from the VS Code team 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:27.420 to discuss what they've been up to with VS Code and Python. 00:00:27.860 --> 00:00:32.980 This is Talk Python To Me, episode 216, recorded May 8th, 2019. 00:00:32.980 --> 00:00:49.260 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python, 00:00:49.260 --> 00:00:52.320 the language, the libraries, the ecosystem, and the personalities. 00:00:52.320 --> 00:00:54.260 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:00:54.260 --> 00:00:56.400 Follow me on Twitter where I'm @mkennedy. 00:00:56.600 --> 00:01:00.140 Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm 00:01:00.140 --> 00:01:02.640 and follow the show on Twitter via at Talk Python. 00:01:02.640 --> 00:01:06.200 This episode is sponsored by Linode and Backlog. 00:01:06.200 --> 00:01:08.280 Please check out what they're offering during their segments. 00:01:08.280 --> 00:01:09.560 It really helps support the show. 00:01:09.560 --> 00:01:12.040 Dan, welcome to Talk Python. 00:01:12.040 --> 00:01:12.980 Hi, it's great to be here. 00:01:12.980 --> 00:01:14.720 It's great to have you on the show. 00:01:14.720 --> 00:01:19.200 And we get one of these special opportunities to do an in-person recording with each other, right? 00:01:19.200 --> 00:01:22.960 Before we get into the normal flow, I just want to say, 00:01:22.960 --> 00:01:29.900 hey, we're here at Microsoft Build recording live, not in a live audience, but in person and sort of on the floor here. 00:01:29.900 --> 00:01:30.840 So it's really, really cool. 00:01:30.840 --> 00:01:31.640 It's great to be here. 00:01:31.640 --> 00:01:32.940 And we're going to talk a bit about that. 00:01:32.940 --> 00:01:34.120 Also about PyCon. 00:01:34.120 --> 00:01:35.460 But, you know, let's start at the beginning. 00:01:35.460 --> 00:01:36.320 Start with your story. 00:01:36.320 --> 00:01:37.820 How did you get into programming and Python? 00:01:37.980 --> 00:01:43.500 Programming, I've kind of had like a computer, a 386 computer since I was like five years old at my house, right? 00:01:43.500 --> 00:01:47.460 And so I was always doing a lot of like batch file stuff and DOS and things like that. 00:01:47.460 --> 00:01:48.580 But I remember batch files. 00:01:48.580 --> 00:01:50.900 That used to feel like pretty awesome programming stuff, right? 00:01:50.900 --> 00:01:54.600 You would be able to make the computer do its magic at startup, right? 00:01:54.600 --> 00:01:56.660 You could mess with auto-exec bat and all that stuff. 00:01:56.660 --> 00:01:57.120 Yeah, yeah. 00:01:57.120 --> 00:02:02.740 And then like if you were like get really into it, I mean, doing an if statement and batch file programming is like really, really hard. 00:02:02.740 --> 00:02:05.620 But, you know, I made like a little text adventure game, something like that. 00:02:05.620 --> 00:02:06.600 Oh, my gosh, that's awesome. 00:02:06.760 --> 00:02:11.180 Yeah, but I think oddly enough, when I really got into programming was with Visual Basic 6. 00:02:11.180 --> 00:02:16.820 I was sitting in grade school just like during reading time just reading a VB6 book that I printed out. 00:02:16.820 --> 00:02:18.700 And everyone's looking at me going like, what is this guy doing? 00:02:18.700 --> 00:02:19.500 That's awesome. 00:02:19.500 --> 00:02:26.260 I remember printing out the source code for Notepad, I think, in C++ and reading and trying to understand it way back in the day. 00:02:26.260 --> 00:02:27.780 That's pretty cool. 00:02:27.780 --> 00:02:30.760 You know, VB6, that was a special time, actually. 00:02:30.760 --> 00:02:36.300 You could really build some cool UIs super quick with VB6, that drag and drop stuff. 00:02:36.480 --> 00:02:39.480 And I feel like we kind of don't really have that anymore. 00:02:39.480 --> 00:02:44.040 Yeah, I mean, that's really what got me hooked into programming that you could kind of like I could see something. 00:02:44.040 --> 00:02:45.200 I could just double click. 00:02:45.200 --> 00:02:49.600 And then it really gave me this, you know, it's that game of where you get that five minutes to success. 00:02:49.600 --> 00:02:52.000 And you just want to like keep playing the game until you build up stuff. 00:02:52.000 --> 00:02:53.700 I built all sorts of different programs up. 00:02:53.780 --> 00:02:59.300 I mean, some of the like visual programming stuff is starting to come back with like EduBlocks and MakeCode and some of those things. 00:02:59.300 --> 00:03:04.140 And I think that kind of stuff can really like maybe get more young people into programming. 00:03:04.140 --> 00:03:06.680 Just like that was kind of the aha moment for me. 00:03:06.680 --> 00:03:07.880 You know, that sort of stuff. 00:03:07.880 --> 00:03:09.780 Yeah, I definitely think that's... 00:03:09.780 --> 00:03:11.080 I think it's a little bit missing. 00:03:11.080 --> 00:03:17.740 I think a lot of the cool frameworks that were really good at that kind of outgrew it a little bit and become like a little more pro, which is fine. 00:03:17.740 --> 00:03:22.120 But it also means like those simple, easy steps into like super quick UIs is gone. 00:03:22.120 --> 00:03:23.580 I mean, VB6 is good. 00:03:23.580 --> 00:03:25.160 Windows Forms was actually not bad. 00:03:25.220 --> 00:03:27.500 But it kind of became WPF, which is super hard. 00:03:27.500 --> 00:03:30.540 Not super hard, but relatively for like just jumping into it. 00:03:30.540 --> 00:03:34.660 There's Anvil, which is kind of a cool web front end thing and Python. 00:03:34.660 --> 00:03:36.420 But yeah, there's not too many of them. 00:03:36.420 --> 00:03:38.560 Anyway, so that was sort of the getting started point. 00:03:38.560 --> 00:03:39.600 But that's not Python, right? 00:03:39.600 --> 00:03:40.280 That's VB6. 00:03:40.280 --> 00:03:44.220 I think the first time I used Python, I was working at Autodesk and I was working on some of the graphic stuff. 00:03:44.220 --> 00:03:51.000 And there it was all just building UIs in Python and using Swig to interact with C++ and stuff like that. 00:03:51.160 --> 00:04:00.420 And then I just kind of like took that back to school with me to school projects where professors were kind of saying, you know, hey, you should use a real programming language so that you can like learn real programming. 00:04:00.420 --> 00:04:01.640 And I'm like, what are you talking about? 00:04:01.640 --> 00:04:02.820 You know, this is real programming. 00:04:02.820 --> 00:04:04.060 I just built all this stuff with it. 00:04:04.060 --> 00:04:09.740 And now you've got like all these big companies doing, you know, you've got sites like Instagram and Pinterest all built with Python. 00:04:09.740 --> 00:04:10.180 Yeah, yeah. 00:04:10.180 --> 00:04:12.620 Like, I mean, YouTube gets a million requests per second. 00:04:12.620 --> 00:04:13.600 Is that not real enough? 00:04:13.600 --> 00:04:14.420 Yeah, yeah, exactly. 00:04:14.420 --> 00:04:17.740 So it's interesting how our perspective changes on that stuff over time. 00:04:17.740 --> 00:04:21.080 You know, it makes me crazy when people call Python a scripting language. 00:04:21.320 --> 00:04:21.420 Yeah. 00:04:21.420 --> 00:04:24.160 You know, you're like, oh, is that your favorite scripting language? 00:04:24.160 --> 00:04:24.800 I'm like, whoa. 00:04:24.800 --> 00:04:26.160 Well, it's great at scripting. 00:04:26.160 --> 00:04:26.840 Exactly. 00:04:26.840 --> 00:04:28.960 It's also great at a lot of other stuff too. 00:04:28.960 --> 00:04:30.120 You can build real things with it. 00:04:30.120 --> 00:04:35.360 So your time at Autodesk, was that building stuff that was like embedded into some of those apps? 00:04:35.360 --> 00:04:36.920 Or was it like workflow between the apps? 00:04:36.920 --> 00:04:37.840 What kind of stuff was there? 00:04:37.840 --> 00:04:44.720 Well, I was working on a product that I don't remember exactly what it was called, but it was doing like visualization of cars and things like that. 00:04:44.720 --> 00:04:45.000 Cool. 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:50.260 The UI, that team had decided to use Python for the UI with WX widgets. 00:04:50.260 --> 00:04:53.720 And then it would call down in the C++ layer to do a lot of the 3D graphics. 00:04:53.720 --> 00:04:56.320 But it did a lot of the scene manipulation and things like that with Python. 00:04:56.320 --> 00:04:59.420 So there was some vector math and sort of all sorts of stuff that was in Python. 00:04:59.420 --> 00:05:06.060 So it was this weird, you know, you could do a lot of things in Python and then all of a sudden you're in this big C++ world and stuff like that. 00:05:06.180 --> 00:05:07.480 Yeah, it sounds really cool though. 00:05:07.480 --> 00:05:12.180 The 3D stuff is always so interesting, but it's also pretty challenging to work in. 00:05:12.180 --> 00:05:16.100 Like I built a couple from scratch 3D simulators and OpenGL and stuff. 00:05:16.100 --> 00:05:18.580 And I always thought the first half, I'm like, this is going to be so fun. 00:05:18.580 --> 00:05:20.840 The second half, I'm like, why can't I see the thing? 00:05:20.840 --> 00:05:24.340 You know, because I have the clockwise versus anti-clockwise rotation. 00:05:24.340 --> 00:05:26.340 Yeah, you're doing that thing with your fingers where you get the three axes. 00:05:26.340 --> 00:05:34.320 And I had this book, you know, real-time rendering where I'm just like, you know, staring up in the room trying to like, you know, figure out what direction things are pointed at. 00:05:34.320 --> 00:05:34.640 Yeah. 00:05:34.640 --> 00:05:35.220 It's kind of crazy. 00:05:35.640 --> 00:05:36.540 It's totally crazy. 00:05:36.540 --> 00:05:39.120 Let's talk a little bit about what you do day to day. 00:05:39.120 --> 00:05:40.140 You work at Microsoft. 00:05:40.140 --> 00:05:40.780 What do you do there? 00:05:40.780 --> 00:05:44.620 So I'm a principal PM manager for a Python developer tools team. 00:05:44.620 --> 00:05:45.980 I have a small team of PMs. 00:05:45.980 --> 00:05:51.420 We work on Python and Visual Studio Code, Python Visual Studio, and then also Python and Azure. 00:05:51.420 --> 00:05:52.720 Yeah, that's pretty awesome. 00:05:52.720 --> 00:05:55.460 It's a pretty big set of different things, but yeah, we do quite a bit. 00:05:55.460 --> 00:05:56.260 Yeah, and it's growing, right? 00:05:56.260 --> 00:05:57.040 Yep, it's growing. 00:05:57.040 --> 00:06:00.540 When I started the team, it was just me and one other PM. 00:06:00.860 --> 00:06:02.760 And I was working with Brett Cannon. 00:06:02.760 --> 00:06:09.520 And now Brett Cannon's managing a team, and I'm managing, you know, it's sort of just, we're doing a lot with Python and Microsoft. 00:06:09.520 --> 00:06:10.700 Yeah, it's super exciting. 00:06:10.700 --> 00:06:16.500 And yeah, so you work with a lot of people, a lot of the folks at Microsoft that are also, have been on the show, yeah? 00:06:16.500 --> 00:06:20.620 Been on the show and out there in the community, you know, working on the core Python developers. 00:06:21.000 --> 00:06:23.480 We got a couple of, you know, Brett and Steve on our team, yeah. 00:06:23.480 --> 00:06:23.680 Cool. 00:06:23.680 --> 00:06:33.300 Yeah, I think it's going to be a pretty interesting perspective that you have coming from, like, Microsoft customers and developers intersecting here with Python, right? 00:06:33.300 --> 00:06:42.960 Like, it's, I feel like you might get a little more visibility into what Python and enterprise or large corporate places kind of looks like. 00:06:42.960 --> 00:06:44.300 What are your thoughts there? 00:06:44.300 --> 00:06:45.820 Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting spectrum. 00:06:46.060 --> 00:06:53.300 I mean, we definitely see a lot more, I work with a lot more individual developers working in Python land than I do in other places. 00:06:53.300 --> 00:06:58.600 But then we also hear with .NET and the other programming languages, we talk to a lot more big enterprises, right? 00:06:58.600 --> 00:07:02.260 But we also hear from, you know, the big enterprises doing Python. 00:07:02.260 --> 00:07:12.340 They have all these challenges and concerns around performance and scale and compliance and security and, like, all these different things that, you know, when you're just sitting down there trying to, like, you know, 00:07:12.340 --> 00:07:17.340 hey, how do I learn programming and make Hello World that, you know, these two worlds are very at odds with each other. 00:07:17.340 --> 00:07:25.580 And it's interesting watching sort of the core development team on Python trying to navigate and negotiate the different pressures and stuff like that that are kind of coming from two directions. 00:07:25.580 --> 00:07:37.260 How do we enable it to meet all these enterprise needs while still keeping it, you know, fun, easy to use, really productive, and not adding a whole bunch of, you know, stuff that's getting in my way, right? 00:07:37.260 --> 00:07:37.860 Yeah, yeah. 00:07:37.860 --> 00:07:40.880 Don't over-professionalize the Python. 00:07:40.880 --> 00:07:45.700 Because, you know, one of the things I go on a lot about is, like, how Python is a full-spectrum language. 00:07:45.700 --> 00:07:48.280 Like, you don't have to take the complexity at the beginning. 00:07:48.280 --> 00:07:53.040 Like, you can be productive with Python with, like, a partial understanding of what it is, what it can do. 00:07:53.040 --> 00:07:57.660 But it can't, you don't outgrow it so much, like, say, vb6, for example, like you said earlier. 00:07:57.660 --> 00:07:58.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:07:58.280 --> 00:08:05.120 And, I mean, Python is kind of my go-to for, you know, anytime I want to do something, my first answer is, like, can I do this with Python, right? 00:08:05.120 --> 00:08:12.960 But in terms of, like, kind of managing the complexity, I think, I forget the name of that, that backslash operator that gives you the sort of positional arguments and stuff like that. 00:08:12.960 --> 00:08:14.460 You know, that's an interesting one. 00:08:14.460 --> 00:08:18.740 It's, like, where you can add that and you can use it and that allows you to interface with C-APIs and things like that. 00:08:18.740 --> 00:08:20.700 But hopefully most people never have to see that, right? 00:08:20.700 --> 00:08:21.480 Yeah, exactly. 00:08:21.480 --> 00:08:22.040 Right. 00:08:22.040 --> 00:08:27.480 You could go your whole life as a developer not knowing that there's a syntax for keyword-only arguments. 00:08:27.480 --> 00:08:31.380 And now there's a syntax for positional-only arguments, right? 00:08:31.380 --> 00:08:32.440 You don't need to know. 00:08:32.440 --> 00:08:32.840 It's cool. 00:08:32.840 --> 00:08:33.240 Yeah. 00:08:33.240 --> 00:08:33.920 Cool. 00:08:33.920 --> 00:08:40.300 So, we were both just at PyCon and we quickly got on a plane and flew to Seattle to go to build. 00:08:40.300 --> 00:08:43.080 What were your thoughts on, I guess, PyCon first? 00:08:43.080 --> 00:08:45.080 PyCon is just such an amazing event. 00:08:45.080 --> 00:08:48.280 And it's, I don't think I've been to another event that's quite like it. 00:08:48.280 --> 00:08:55.340 I mean, it really is, you know, Ernest was on the stage talking about how this PyCon means community to a lot of people, right? 00:08:55.340 --> 00:08:59.720 And just seeing that in the community and it's such a diverse and inclusive place. 00:08:59.980 --> 00:09:10.380 And so, you know, last year was my first PyCon and after I left, I was sort of like, I think I'd keep coming back here even if I wasn't working on Python or working at Microsoft and stuff like that. 00:09:10.380 --> 00:09:11.100 Yeah, that's super cool. 00:09:11.100 --> 00:09:13.620 I feel like it's like my geek holiday, my geek getaway. 00:09:13.700 --> 00:09:20.380 Yeah, and then there's all the people that you see through all the different events throughout the year and all the things. 00:09:20.380 --> 00:09:27.020 So, it's great that, you know, Microsoft is there and we're able to help sponsor it where the Keystone sponsored the event. 00:09:27.020 --> 00:09:32.960 So, it was great to have kind of the big presence there and just really just see a lot of people coming up and talking to us at the event. 00:09:32.960 --> 00:09:33.960 Yeah, that's super. 00:09:34.080 --> 00:09:38.160 And you guys had a cool, like, hands-on thing where people could get a little robot or something. 00:09:38.160 --> 00:09:38.880 What was that about? 00:09:38.880 --> 00:09:46.520 Yeah, so we had hands-on labs using, like, VS Code and some of our, like, Azure functions and some of our cognitive services. 00:09:46.520 --> 00:09:51.720 And then you get a little Adafruit lunchbox kit, which has some circuits and some things like that. 00:09:51.720 --> 00:09:58.620 And then Nina actually did a workshop with the Adafruit team where they came over with your lunchboxes and walked people through a sample lab. 00:09:58.620 --> 00:10:00.000 Yeah, that's really cool. 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:03.980 Yeah, Nina's got a bunch of cool embedded wearable stuff going on and it's, like, right up her alley. 00:10:04.100 --> 00:10:05.160 Yeah, she loves that stuff. 00:10:05.160 --> 00:10:09.300 And she did a keynote on Python hardware and, I mean, it was just awesome. 00:10:09.300 --> 00:10:15.620 And I really loved how she said that hardware really makes people more interested in programming. 00:10:15.620 --> 00:10:21.260 And women in particular, it makes them more likely to stick with programming and tech and stuff like that. 00:10:21.260 --> 00:10:26.800 Yeah, there were some super interesting results coming from the BBC Microbit study done in the UK a couple years ago. 00:10:26.800 --> 00:10:31.600 And just how much more likely people were to go into STEM or care about it. 00:10:31.600 --> 00:10:32.800 It just makes it real, right? 00:10:32.880 --> 00:10:34.380 It's sort of like what we were talking about earlier. 00:10:34.380 --> 00:10:36.420 It's sort of you see that, hey, I can do something. 00:10:36.420 --> 00:10:37.300 I can make these lights flash. 00:10:37.300 --> 00:10:38.060 I can make noises. 00:10:38.060 --> 00:10:38.800 You know what I mean? 00:10:38.800 --> 00:10:41.080 And it just wants to make you keep playing the game, right? 00:10:41.080 --> 00:10:41.760 Yeah, absolutely. 00:10:41.760 --> 00:10:47.320 You get those quick wins and things like CircuitPython and stuff make it way easier than, you know, embedded C. 00:10:47.320 --> 00:10:47.960 Yeah, yeah. 00:10:47.960 --> 00:10:48.660 No backslashes. 00:10:48.660 --> 00:10:49.460 Yeah, right on. 00:10:49.460 --> 00:10:52.460 Let's start talking a little bit about VS Code. 00:10:52.460 --> 00:10:54.700 So when did VS Code come out? 00:10:54.700 --> 00:10:56.080 It came out in 2015. 00:10:56.080 --> 00:10:58.300 I don't remember the exact month, but 2015. 00:10:58.300 --> 00:10:59.400 So not too long ago. 00:10:59.400 --> 00:11:00.260 Yeah, not too long ago. 00:11:00.260 --> 00:11:04.360 And originally, it wasn't necessarily supporting Python right out of the box, right? 00:11:04.360 --> 00:11:06.560 So when it originally came out, it was... 00:11:06.560 --> 00:11:09.500 And what was the original goal or like idea behind it? 00:11:09.580 --> 00:11:24.140 So the original like, you know, pitch, it was a free open source cross-platform editor with support for Node.js and JavaScript with built-in debugging and source control, right? 00:11:24.140 --> 00:11:24.220 Right. 00:11:24.220 --> 00:11:26.540 So it's kind of like an editor plus, right? 00:11:26.540 --> 00:11:27.900 Just a little bit of extra functionality. 00:11:27.900 --> 00:11:37.620 Yeah, it seems to me like its original zen was just like, we're going to try to be as minimal as possible while providing you like real tooling, right? 00:11:37.680 --> 00:11:42.840 Like editors and autocomplete, but try to be the least amount of that that we can still get away with. 00:11:42.840 --> 00:11:44.620 That was my perception from the outside. 00:11:44.620 --> 00:11:52.500 Certainly, like you see a lot of people using things like Vim or Notepad++ and stuff like that. 00:11:52.500 --> 00:11:57.060 And you can see a lot of people just want, you know, let me just open the code and start working with it. 00:11:57.060 --> 00:12:01.940 And then, you know, start from there and then add on the debugging and functionality, you know, sort of on top of that. 00:12:01.940 --> 00:12:05.700 And then shortly after that, they didn't have extensions when they first released it. 00:12:05.760 --> 00:12:10.340 And then everyone was like, you know, it got quite a good reception when they first put it out there. 00:12:10.340 --> 00:12:11.940 And then everyone's asking for extensions. 00:12:11.940 --> 00:12:16.820 And so once they put the extensions out there, that's when other languages started really coming on board like Python. 00:12:16.820 --> 00:12:19.000 Yeah, I feel like that kind of made it blow up. 00:12:19.000 --> 00:12:19.680 Yeah, yeah. 00:12:19.680 --> 00:12:20.580 It really opened the doors. 00:12:20.580 --> 00:12:25.520 And the extensions is really what a lot of people say they love about VS Code today. 00:12:25.520 --> 00:12:30.820 You know, that it's just got so many extensions out there and so many people building them and creating them. 00:12:30.820 --> 00:12:33.340 And that's even how Python got its roots. 00:12:33.340 --> 00:12:38.360 Don Giamatti from Australia just built a Python extension and put it out there. 00:12:38.360 --> 00:12:40.660 And it sort of took off on the marketplace. 00:12:40.920 --> 00:12:41.540 Yeah, that's super cool. 00:12:41.540 --> 00:12:43.960 And I had him on the show quite a while ago. 00:12:43.960 --> 00:12:49.420 And we were remarking about how insanely popular that extension was. 00:12:49.420 --> 00:12:51.720 This was before he worked with you and at Microsoft. 00:12:51.720 --> 00:12:52.620 It was just his thing. 00:12:52.620 --> 00:12:58.240 And I think we were like, wow, there's a million downloads or 500,000 downloads or something like that, right? 00:12:58.380 --> 00:12:58.880 Yeah, yeah. 00:12:58.880 --> 00:13:02.400 And that number just keeps increasing all the time, right? 00:13:02.400 --> 00:13:06.580 So even a year ago, there was 6 million downloads and now there's 44 million. 00:13:06.580 --> 00:13:08.840 Yeah, I looked at it, it's like 44 million. 00:13:08.840 --> 00:13:19.140 And what's pretty impressive to me is this project that comes from Microsoft that's traditionally been pretty heavy in the C#, C++ side of things. 00:13:20.020 --> 00:13:30.320 If you pull up the most popular plugins or extensions, you don't see C# and then like ASP.NET extensions and then somewhere down the list, Python, right? 00:13:30.320 --> 00:13:33.800 Like Python is the number one most popular extension. 00:13:33.800 --> 00:13:34.320 Yeah. 00:13:34.320 --> 00:13:40.780 And that's something that really got me excited to move over to the Python team at Microsoft about two years ago. 00:13:40.780 --> 00:13:44.040 They said, hey, I've been walking around saying, why aren't we doing more with Python? 00:13:44.040 --> 00:13:46.840 Come on, we should be doing, we have a Python team, but, you know, we should be doing more. 00:13:46.840 --> 00:13:51.500 And then, you know, someone said, hey, we hired Don and we're going to, you know, put a team on it. 00:13:51.500 --> 00:13:52.060 You want to do this? 00:13:52.060 --> 00:13:53.940 And I was like, ah, I got to, I got to jump over there. 00:13:53.940 --> 00:13:54.820 Yeah, how do I get involved with that? 00:13:54.820 --> 00:13:55.280 That's awesome. 00:13:55.280 --> 00:13:57.800 It's just so much fun working on this team. 00:13:57.800 --> 00:13:58.400 That's super cool. 00:13:58.400 --> 00:14:06.380 Yeah, I did some other looking around and the second and third most popular extensions are ESLint is number two and C++ is number three. 00:14:06.380 --> 00:14:10.100 And they're only half as many, which is still 20 million, but they're still significantly less. 00:14:10.100 --> 00:14:14.540 One thing I will say about the download count is every time we push an update to the extension, those count as new downloads. 00:14:14.540 --> 00:14:16.780 So they've added the install counts. 00:14:16.780 --> 00:14:17.820 On the marketplace. 00:14:17.820 --> 00:14:18.660 I see. 00:14:18.660 --> 00:14:19.720 Just full disclosure. 00:14:19.720 --> 00:14:20.340 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:14:20.340 --> 00:14:22.060 We push out a lot of little updates now and then. 00:14:22.060 --> 00:14:22.940 So some of those can. 00:14:22.940 --> 00:14:26.780 So the more active teams can like get a little better, get a little ahead. 00:14:26.780 --> 00:14:27.300 Yeah, exactly. 00:14:27.300 --> 00:14:28.620 That's still pretty good though. 00:14:28.620 --> 00:14:30.720 But yeah, we're still the number one by installs as well. 00:14:30.720 --> 00:14:32.900 VS Code is an Electron JS app, right? 00:14:32.900 --> 00:14:33.260 Mm-hmm. 00:14:33.440 --> 00:14:36.700 Maybe tell people quickly who don't know, like there's all sorts of folks who listen. 00:14:36.700 --> 00:14:37.780 Like, what is that? 00:14:37.780 --> 00:14:42.240 Like, that's kind of a fairly new and unusual way to build an app, but it's definitely taken off. 00:14:42.240 --> 00:14:45.120 Like Slack and some other folks are that way as well. 00:14:45.120 --> 00:14:48.180 I'll do the best just as I can being a program manager. 00:14:48.380 --> 00:14:52.200 But the Electron is a framework for building JavaScript apps on the desktop. 00:14:52.200 --> 00:15:02.520 And I think that's what we really enabled us to create something that was cross-platform right out of the gate without too much dealing with weird low-level C platform code, right? 00:15:02.520 --> 00:15:02.740 Right. 00:15:02.820 --> 00:15:07.840 You've got Chrome that's already cross-platform, Node that's cross-platform, and then JavaScript and HTML, right? 00:15:07.840 --> 00:15:08.160 Yeah. 00:15:08.160 --> 00:15:09.620 It made so much sense for us. 00:15:09.620 --> 00:15:16.000 We had this online editor called Monaco, which was created by Eric Gamma, one of the Gang of Four. 00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:19.260 The original design patterns from, you know, like early 90s? 00:15:19.260 --> 00:15:19.620 Yeah. 00:15:19.620 --> 00:15:19.920 Yeah. 00:15:19.920 --> 00:15:27.940 And he had built this online editor that we've been using in Microsoft for some of our, like, online source control, some online editing experiences in Azure. 00:15:28.740 --> 00:15:35.420 And so they were just able to say, like, hey, we got this online editor, we got Electron, let's build VS Code. 00:15:35.420 --> 00:15:38.920 And they really actually put it together relatively quickly and just put it out there. 00:15:38.920 --> 00:15:44.140 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Linode. 00:15:44.140 --> 00:15:47.880 Are you looking for hosting that's fast, simple, and incredibly affordable? 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00:16:29.080 --> 00:16:32.140 Just visit talkpython.fm/Linode. 00:16:32.140 --> 00:16:43.880 One thing that's a little interesting is you guys also now have, I mean, not you individually, you as the Microsoft, you have Atom after you've acquired GitHub, right? 00:16:43.880 --> 00:16:46.700 Which is also ElectronJS, I believe. 00:16:47.060 --> 00:16:49.300 It's kind of interesting, like, what's the story with those two? 00:16:49.300 --> 00:16:50.560 Are they both going forward? 00:16:50.560 --> 00:16:57.180 Yeah, so Nat Friedman, when he became the CEO of GitHub, he did an AMA on Reddit, and this question came up. 00:16:57.180 --> 00:16:58.800 And I loved his answer. 00:16:58.800 --> 00:17:03.920 He said, as long as people want to keep using Atom, we'll still work on Atom and put it out there. 00:17:03.920 --> 00:17:06.840 Yeah, I know some people are using Atom, and they're doing cool stuff with it. 00:17:06.900 --> 00:17:07.940 So it's pretty awesome. 00:17:07.940 --> 00:17:12.320 But yeah, it's kind of interesting how things have shifted. 00:17:12.320 --> 00:17:19.300 How's the whole GitHub acquisition changed or changed people's perspective for you all working on the team, or has it? 00:17:19.300 --> 00:17:24.680 They're still kind of managed as this different company, have their own CEO and stuff like that. 00:17:24.680 --> 00:17:36.880 And I can only speak from my own experience, but my own experience is that we're just more likely to recommend using GitHub in places, rather than having to, you know, maybe come up with our own solution or have two implementations sometimes. 00:17:36.880 --> 00:17:38.780 It makes it a lot easier to say, well, just use GitHub. 00:17:38.780 --> 00:17:39.100 Yeah. 00:17:39.540 --> 00:17:41.720 Well, I think people are starting to say that anyway. 00:17:41.720 --> 00:17:42.200 Yes. 00:17:42.200 --> 00:17:42.420 Yeah. 00:17:42.420 --> 00:17:42.700 Right? 00:17:42.700 --> 00:17:44.580 We're already kind of going in that direction. 00:17:44.580 --> 00:17:57.040 So before there was any word of you all buying GitHub, it was still like, clearly the momentum, the black hole of open source in a positive way was GitHub just sucking everything in. 00:17:57.040 --> 00:17:57.280 Right? 00:17:57.280 --> 00:17:57.740 Yeah. 00:17:57.740 --> 00:18:03.060 And, you know, I was so excited when I opened my phone up and pulled up my stock ticker app. 00:18:03.060 --> 00:18:03.720 I'm like, what? 00:18:03.720 --> 00:18:05.280 This is amazing. 00:18:05.280 --> 00:18:07.180 What is this news event? 00:18:07.180 --> 00:18:07.740 What is this? 00:18:07.740 --> 00:18:07.980 Yeah. 00:18:07.980 --> 00:18:08.900 I think it's positive. 00:18:08.900 --> 00:18:15.780 I know there was a little bit of surprise, some trepidation in the open source space when that first hit. 00:18:15.780 --> 00:18:21.740 There are people talking about moving to Bitbucket or other places, but I don't really see that manifesting. 00:18:21.740 --> 00:18:31.600 What I thought was super interesting was actually looking at some of the reasons behind, and it looked like it was really, in the end, a pretty positive outcome for both GitHub and you guys. 00:18:31.600 --> 00:18:38.440 The thing that, and I can just react to what I read, there's always a negative reaction somewhere to anything you do as a large company, right? 00:18:38.440 --> 00:18:38.680 Yeah. 00:18:38.680 --> 00:18:39.620 There's always somebody not happy. 00:18:39.620 --> 00:18:45.960 But what I was really encouraged by was that, you know, people out there saying, oh, this is terrible. 00:18:45.960 --> 00:18:46.500 This is evil. 00:18:46.500 --> 00:18:53.380 And then other people that weren't from Microsoft were like, you know, arguing with those people saying like, hey, no, this is actually good. 00:18:53.380 --> 00:18:55.420 Where Microsoft is, they love open source. 00:18:55.620 --> 00:18:59.140 And there's other companies that could have bought them that would have been much worse. 00:18:59.140 --> 00:18:59.620 Right. 00:18:59.620 --> 00:19:07.320 And I can really have the resources to make sure that GitHub thrives and continues to be the big platform for doing open source. 00:19:07.320 --> 00:19:07.460 Yeah. 00:19:07.460 --> 00:19:13.400 Actually, one of the, VS Code actually, I think is the biggest open source project on GitHub when we made that acquisition. 00:19:13.400 --> 00:19:19.580 So it's already a platform that we, you know, are really well invested in just as individual developers. 00:19:19.580 --> 00:19:22.720 So you kind of bought your source control provider. 00:19:22.720 --> 00:19:23.420 Yeah. 00:19:23.420 --> 00:19:25.220 Just took everyone else with it. 00:19:25.220 --> 00:19:25.980 How interesting. 00:19:25.980 --> 00:19:27.340 Okay, cool. 00:19:27.460 --> 00:19:30.960 Let's focus a little bit on the growth of VS Code, I guess. 00:19:30.960 --> 00:19:32.320 You know, I was really surprised. 00:19:32.320 --> 00:19:34.140 Like, we talked about the origins a little bit. 00:19:34.140 --> 00:19:38.440 2015 or so it came out and then the extensions and whatnot. 00:19:38.440 --> 00:19:39.760 Did it surprise you? 00:19:39.760 --> 00:19:49.700 Did you guys do like a backflip of joy when you saw the Stack Overflow survey showing, you know, VS Code like the number one editor out there in terms of usage? 00:19:49.700 --> 00:19:51.180 I was very happy to see that. 00:19:51.180 --> 00:19:54.300 I mean, it just sort of, I still don't really understand what that means. 00:19:54.480 --> 00:20:02.300 You know what I mean in terms of, like, wow, it's actually the majority of developers use Visual Studio Code, you know, if you look at that survey. 00:20:02.300 --> 00:20:04.220 And that's just, I can't comprehend that. 00:20:04.220 --> 00:20:07.500 You know, it's just, I don't know, I feel a little honored to work on it. 00:20:07.500 --> 00:20:09.120 Yeah, that's actually, that's pretty awesome, right? 00:20:09.120 --> 00:20:17.860 You know, one thing I would like to ask you, and I have my own opinions and I don't think it's crazy or anything, but, like, why would Microsoft work on this? 00:20:17.860 --> 00:20:19.960 Like, you're not selling it, right? 00:20:19.960 --> 00:20:21.420 It's just, you just go get it. 00:20:21.420 --> 00:20:22.040 It's free. 00:20:22.440 --> 00:20:27.580 What value do you guys have in this other than, like, Goodwill and we just want it to exist or whatever? 00:20:27.580 --> 00:20:30.000 Yeah, so this question comes up all the time, right? 00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:30.860 People always ask this. 00:20:30.860 --> 00:20:37.200 And I don't know if you know about Microsoft, but we've always had a really giant developer tools division. 00:20:37.200 --> 00:20:40.000 And we've always given developer tools away for free. 00:20:40.000 --> 00:20:46.180 Like, Visual Studio, I think it's a paid product, but actually the majority of people use the free community edition for something like that. 00:20:46.180 --> 00:20:52.640 But before Visual Studio Code, you know, there's a lot that, you know, if you're an open source developer, you're using Python or Node or something like that. 00:20:52.640 --> 00:20:57.900 We didn't really have much that was relevant to you from Microsoft because a lot of our stuff was Windows only. 00:20:58.460 --> 00:20:58.840 Right. 00:20:58.840 --> 00:21:03.500 You had Visual Studio, you had Python tools for Visual Studio, but like you said, that's Windows only. 00:21:03.500 --> 00:21:06.740 And that's, you know, that already creates a lot of friction already. 00:21:06.740 --> 00:21:15.760 For us, you know, the benefit to Microsoft is that, you know, if you use Visual Studio Code and you like your experience there, maybe you'll consider some of our other stuff. 00:21:15.760 --> 00:21:18.240 And it really comes down to that, you know. 00:21:19.380 --> 00:21:22.260 Otherwise, you know, you're not really thinking about us. 00:21:22.260 --> 00:21:23.800 You were not in the conversation. 00:21:23.800 --> 00:21:24.320 Yeah. 00:21:24.320 --> 00:21:27.380 That would have been my guess of what you were trying to get out of it. 00:21:27.380 --> 00:21:30.000 But, you know, I wanted to see it from your perspective, right? 00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:35.620 Like, if you have interesting Azure plugins, like push a button here and it's on our Kubernetes service, right? 00:21:35.620 --> 00:21:41.340 Like, if it's right there next to them, like then all of a sudden there's your sort of implicit upsell or whatever. 00:21:41.340 --> 00:21:41.620 Yeah. 00:21:41.620 --> 00:21:43.980 And so just leave that option on the table, right? 00:21:43.980 --> 00:21:46.580 You can choose to use that if you want, right? 00:21:46.580 --> 00:21:46.860 Yeah. 00:21:46.960 --> 00:21:52.760 It does also allow us to create a really good developer experience for Azure with our Azure plugins, right? 00:21:52.760 --> 00:21:59.820 Because we can sort of, it's sort of like the vertical stack integrated, but also like, you know, choose your own pieces, you know, whatever. 00:21:59.820 --> 00:22:00.780 Yeah, that's interesting. 00:22:00.780 --> 00:22:05.040 I suppose like in addition to being like, it's near you, so here's the upsell button. 00:22:05.040 --> 00:22:13.720 Like the people who already choose Azure or other tooling from you guys, like you can provide them the best possible experience cross-platform for your own stuff. 00:22:13.720 --> 00:22:14.340 Yes. 00:22:14.440 --> 00:22:19.020 Especially if we believe that we have the best developer tools that you can use, right? 00:22:19.020 --> 00:22:19.300 Yeah. 00:22:19.300 --> 00:22:21.640 You've definitely made some great ones over the years. 00:22:21.640 --> 00:22:22.440 So that's pretty cool. 00:22:22.440 --> 00:22:25.300 And I guess, you know, let's touch on some of the features. 00:22:25.300 --> 00:22:29.580 Like, I feel like you all have been on a bit of a tear with like doing some cool stuff. 00:22:29.580 --> 00:22:36.000 So almost all of the announcements and whatnot have been sort of put off or held until here at Build. 00:22:36.000 --> 00:22:37.500 Like, that's your big developer conference. 00:22:37.500 --> 00:22:40.100 That's like Apple's WWDC or Google I.O., right? 00:22:40.100 --> 00:22:40.900 It's our Super Bowl. 00:22:41.140 --> 00:22:41.640 Yeah, exactly. 00:22:41.640 --> 00:22:42.540 Yeah, it's a big deal. 00:22:42.540 --> 00:22:51.580 But the VS Code team announced some pretty cool stuff at PyCon in honor of Python being like the biggest ecosystem there, right? 00:22:51.580 --> 00:22:51.880 Yeah. 00:22:51.880 --> 00:22:58.840 Just last week at PyCon at the expo open, we pushed the buttons and unveiled our Visual Studio Code remote development features. 00:22:59.220 --> 00:23:04.420 And we brought that to PyCon because it was Python developers who were the most passionate about it. 00:23:04.420 --> 00:23:07.120 And actually, that's at PyCon last year. 00:23:07.120 --> 00:23:08.760 That was what everyone was asking us for. 00:23:08.760 --> 00:23:15.380 So we really said, hey, we got to pull this one early because, you know, we want to go talk to the people who are really asking for it. 00:23:15.380 --> 00:23:25.540 And if you don't know, with Python, a lot of people develop inside of Docker containers or on remote, you know, VMs that have access to giant data sets. 00:23:25.540 --> 00:23:28.960 And then also a lot of people on Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux. 00:23:28.960 --> 00:23:33.200 And their tools were just not really able to work in those environments. 00:23:33.200 --> 00:23:33.480 Yeah. 00:23:33.480 --> 00:23:38.940 And Windows Subsystem for Linux, even though it's in the same OS, it's kind of isolated in certain ways, right? 00:23:38.940 --> 00:23:40.140 There's no UI, right? 00:23:40.140 --> 00:23:45.960 So you can't really, like, type code dot on the command line and have a UI pop up until now. 00:23:45.960 --> 00:23:47.040 Until now. 00:23:47.040 --> 00:23:47.800 Yeah. 00:23:47.800 --> 00:23:48.860 So this is a pretty big deal. 00:23:48.860 --> 00:23:58.560 And, you know, I feel like it addresses one of the things that was, I hear a lot, you know, a lot of people say to me, and it's totally fine, but it's not the way that I see the world. 00:23:58.560 --> 00:24:09.740 But it's the way they say, look, I, a lot of times, am going to be remoted, you know, SSHed into a server, or I'll be dropped into some environment like Docker or whatever. 00:24:10.040 --> 00:24:17.720 Where I don't have, you know, my fancy tools, you know, be that PyCharm or VS Code or whatever, right? 00:24:17.720 --> 00:24:22.960 So my thinking is, I'm going to just work in VI or Emacs because I have it everywhere. 00:24:22.960 --> 00:24:28.600 Yeah, I think SSH development is probably the number one driver of VI usage. 00:24:28.600 --> 00:24:29.340 Yeah, yeah, exactly. 00:24:29.340 --> 00:24:32.080 And, you know, it's a totally valid perspective. 00:24:32.080 --> 00:24:35.040 I find it's not the tradeoff I make, but it's fine. 00:24:35.460 --> 00:24:43.760 But I feel like this feature kind of said, like, look, you can have proper tooling all the time over SSH and other things. 00:24:43.760 --> 00:24:44.780 So maybe tell us a little bit. 00:24:44.780 --> 00:24:46.900 It's, like, really broken into three parts, right? 00:24:46.900 --> 00:24:53.860 You talked about WSL, Windows Subsystem for Linux, Docker and containers, and then remote SSH type of development. 00:24:53.860 --> 00:25:01.420 Let me just take a step back and talk about the concept because a lot of people we showed this to, it takes a little bit for it to click because it's a little bit of a different way of using VS Code. 00:25:01.420 --> 00:25:04.860 So the user interface of VS Code runs on your local machine. 00:25:04.860 --> 00:25:11.060 But then there's a remote server that actually hosts kind of like the back end of VS Code, right? 00:25:11.060 --> 00:25:14.000 Right, like a language server and all that kind of business? 00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:21.900 Not just the language server, but, you know, the Python extension, for example, runs on that remote environment, the C++ extension, like, you know, the file system, source control. 00:25:21.900 --> 00:25:26.440 VS Code was always a client server model between the UI and the back end. 00:25:26.440 --> 00:25:30.200 And so what we did, we just took that server and then moved it off the local machine to the remote environment. 00:25:30.200 --> 00:25:31.260 You made it farther away. 00:25:31.260 --> 00:25:32.220 Farther away, exactly. 00:25:32.220 --> 00:25:35.140 So you get an experience that's just like local development. 00:25:35.140 --> 00:25:37.860 You're typing in, the UI is nice and responsive. 00:25:38.340 --> 00:25:42.560 But as you're typing in, it's literally like editing directly the files in the remote system. 00:25:42.560 --> 00:25:44.360 So you can do debugging. 00:25:44.360 --> 00:25:48.060 You can get your IntelliSense and autocompletions, you know. 00:25:48.060 --> 00:25:49.720 Anything that you have. 00:25:49.720 --> 00:25:53.080 With the Python extension, we didn't even have to really make many changes. 00:25:53.080 --> 00:25:53.920 It just kind of worked. 00:25:53.920 --> 00:25:57.580 All the features that we had in there just lit up in this remote environment. 00:25:57.580 --> 00:26:01.520 That's cool because where it's running is actually where it's interacting, right? 00:26:01.520 --> 00:26:03.700 Like it's on your remote SSH machine. 00:26:03.700 --> 00:26:06.520 And so you didn't have to teach it how to find that thing. 00:26:06.520 --> 00:26:07.700 It's already there, right? 00:26:07.720 --> 00:26:11.580 You just open it and we automatically copy over like the server and start it. 00:26:11.580 --> 00:26:14.920 And then you actually don't need any files locally to use it, right? 00:26:14.920 --> 00:26:16.800 It just sort of, it's like the VI experience. 00:26:16.800 --> 00:26:19.180 But, you know, you get all of the rich. 00:26:19.180 --> 00:26:21.860 With debugging and code navigation and all that. 00:26:21.860 --> 00:26:22.100 Yeah. 00:26:22.100 --> 00:26:24.580 And people ask like, okay, how do I set up remote debugging? 00:26:24.580 --> 00:26:26.460 And we say, well, it's not really remote debugging. 00:26:26.460 --> 00:26:30.900 You know, you're remote editing, but it's local debugging kind of, you know. 00:26:30.900 --> 00:26:34.680 So it takes a little bit for it to click, but it's really powerful and it's really, really cool. 00:26:34.680 --> 00:26:34.960 Yeah. 00:26:34.960 --> 00:26:36.560 I'm definitely looking forward to checking it out. 00:26:37.100 --> 00:26:40.880 Certainly the SSH side of the things is where it's interesting for me. 00:26:40.880 --> 00:26:47.760 You know, the Windows subsystem for Linux, you know, I carry around my fruity laptop, so it doesn't matter that much to me, right? 00:26:47.760 --> 00:26:49.680 But if I worked on Windows, that would be cool. 00:26:49.680 --> 00:26:51.020 Containers. 00:26:51.020 --> 00:26:53.220 I think containers are pretty interesting as well. 00:26:53.380 --> 00:26:59.760 So the thing I'd like to say about containers is that if you think about your developer onboarding guide at your company, right? 00:26:59.760 --> 00:27:01.920 And it's got like this wiki with all these steps. 00:27:01.920 --> 00:27:07.900 And then usually the new developer's first job is to go through the onboarding guide and find all the broken stuff and fix it, right? 00:27:07.900 --> 00:27:08.140 Right. 00:27:08.140 --> 00:27:09.280 Install this database server. 00:27:09.280 --> 00:27:11.240 Oh, you got to set this setting so it works. 00:27:11.320 --> 00:27:17.140 Yeah, install Python in your path, but if you had one, remove that or like, you know, this version of Node or that version of Node. 00:27:17.300 --> 00:27:28.560 And the cool part is that with the container development environment, you can just kind of clone the repo, open it with VS Code, and it's sort of all your developer dependencies are just defined there for you. 00:27:28.560 --> 00:27:37.300 And it just starts them up and you can have that environment that you can just start working with and everyone gets sort of the same, whether they're on Windows or Mac or Linux. 00:27:37.300 --> 00:27:38.020 Yeah, that's pretty cool. 00:27:38.020 --> 00:27:43.240 You definitely get the closer to what you're actually running debugging and development experience. 00:27:43.240 --> 00:27:48.100 Well, there's the closer to production, but also just reproducible so that everyone's got the same thing, right? 00:27:48.100 --> 00:27:53.440 Yeah, it's on big teams, it's always a pain to like figure out why, you know, I did some checking. 00:27:53.440 --> 00:27:55.740 It doesn't work for that person, but it does for this other person. 00:27:55.740 --> 00:27:57.620 And yeah, that's no fun. 00:27:57.620 --> 00:27:58.560 Cool. 00:27:58.560 --> 00:28:01.140 So this is in the insider build, right? 00:28:01.140 --> 00:28:05.320 Like I have VS Code and I heard that announcement and I checked for updates and I didn't get any updates. 00:28:05.320 --> 00:28:06.380 I'm like, oh, oh, well. 00:28:06.980 --> 00:28:09.160 What's the story with the insider build and like, how do I get it? 00:28:09.160 --> 00:28:12.260 When will a normal installs just start to see it? 00:28:12.260 --> 00:28:15.500 VS Code Insiders is our daily developer build of VS Code. 00:28:15.500 --> 00:28:16.280 It updates every day. 00:28:16.280 --> 00:28:21.020 And then once a month, the insider's build gets promoted to the thing that gets released, right? 00:28:21.020 --> 00:28:24.020 The VS Code team uses it themselves for building VS Code. 00:28:24.020 --> 00:28:25.260 So it is relatively stable. 00:28:25.260 --> 00:28:25.820 You know what I mean? 00:28:25.820 --> 00:28:30.380 If it breaks, they fix it quite quickly, sometimes overnight because we have a team in Zurich working on it. 00:28:30.380 --> 00:28:32.720 So yeah, it's a side-by-side install. 00:28:32.720 --> 00:28:36.540 You can go to the code.visualstudio.com slash insiders to get the insider's build. 00:28:36.660 --> 00:28:40.920 So it'll be available in the stable within, you know, the next couple weeks. 00:28:40.920 --> 00:28:43.900 Yeah, and it'll probably come out about the time we actually release this episode. 00:28:43.900 --> 00:28:44.340 Yeah. 00:28:44.340 --> 00:28:45.620 So the magic of time shifting. 00:28:45.620 --> 00:28:47.460 Yeah, so the remote extensions are in the marketplace. 00:28:47.460 --> 00:28:48.980 Today they only install on insiders. 00:28:48.980 --> 00:28:53.620 But very soon you can just go to your extensions tab and install the remote development extensions. 00:28:53.620 --> 00:28:55.540 And you'll get all the features that we're talking about. 00:28:55.540 --> 00:28:55.740 Cool. 00:28:55.820 --> 00:28:58.200 So I want to have this ability on my server. 00:28:58.200 --> 00:29:00.260 It's Ubuntu running in the cloud. 00:29:00.260 --> 00:29:01.640 I SSH to it. 00:29:01.640 --> 00:29:02.880 Like, what do I do? 00:29:03.060 --> 00:29:10.000 If you already have a public-private key set up with that SSH server, VS Code just uses your SSH configuration on the machine. 00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:16.640 So you install the remote SSH extension, go to the SSH panel, and you'll see that server listed. 00:29:16.640 --> 00:29:18.920 And then you just click Open New Window in VS Code. 00:29:19.020 --> 00:29:23.440 And then it'll just start up a new version of VS Code running in that remote context. 00:29:23.440 --> 00:29:25.980 So it'll install some stuff, and then all of a sudden it'll just connect. 00:29:25.980 --> 00:29:29.520 And you can start using VS Code as if you're on that machine. 00:29:29.520 --> 00:29:30.220 Oh, that's pretty cool. 00:29:30.220 --> 00:29:34.460 So I don't need to at least manually go and change my server to make that happen. 00:29:34.460 --> 00:29:40.600 Like, the first run, it goes SSH is in there and goes, well, it looks like you're missing the server sites. 00:29:40.600 --> 00:29:42.040 We'll drop that in and then get it started. 00:29:42.040 --> 00:29:42.300 Yep. 00:29:42.300 --> 00:29:44.860 And then you can just start coding. 00:29:44.860 --> 00:29:48.960 You can open folders on that remote machine, create new files, and just start plugging away. 00:29:48.960 --> 00:29:55.660 And then you can install, usually the one-time step is you actually need to install the extensions you want to use on that remote server. 00:29:55.660 --> 00:29:59.220 So you'd go in and install the Python extension, for example, so that you get Python support. 00:29:59.220 --> 00:29:59.560 I see. 00:29:59.560 --> 00:29:59.920 Okay. 00:29:59.920 --> 00:30:01.120 That's pretty interesting. 00:30:01.120 --> 00:30:02.460 What's the security story? 00:30:02.460 --> 00:30:07.160 Like, SSH often means production or servers that are, like, sensitive. 00:30:07.160 --> 00:30:09.000 You don't want people just to do anything there. 00:30:09.000 --> 00:30:14.720 And I guess, you know, it's already protected with your certificates in SSH, but anything to be aware of? 00:30:14.720 --> 00:30:14.940 Yeah. 00:30:15.080 --> 00:30:22.640 So, I mean, the one thing that has come up is sometimes people have a 2FA prompt or challenge that they need to enter in order to really authenticate with that environment. 00:30:22.640 --> 00:30:29.860 So if you're in that situation, there's a setting you can turn on that will bring up the terminal so you can type in an additional password or key if you need to. 00:30:29.860 --> 00:30:32.260 Then how do I interact with files over there? 00:30:32.340 --> 00:30:36.780 Like, is there a way to, like, explore the file system and find the files I'm looking for? 00:30:36.780 --> 00:30:37.520 Do you have projects? 00:30:37.520 --> 00:30:38.160 Like, what is it? 00:30:38.160 --> 00:30:38.780 Yeah. 00:30:38.780 --> 00:30:45.120 So there's two, like, when you open VS Code, you kind of get the, like, open a new file sort of window, you know, the default experience. 00:30:45.120 --> 00:30:48.920 But then you can open the terminal, and the terminal will be running in there, and you can LS and CD around. 00:30:48.920 --> 00:30:53.280 But you can also open a folder, and then you'll actually get a little browse window to browse the file system over there. 00:30:53.540 --> 00:31:02.300 And then if you pick, like, you know, seed for home slash my project, you'll open that, you'll be able to see in the file explorer in the left-hand side. 00:31:02.300 --> 00:31:03.540 You just have, like, the directory trees. 00:31:03.540 --> 00:31:06.000 Yeah, you'll see the directory tree, all the files in there, and stuff like that. 00:31:06.000 --> 00:31:08.060 So that's kind of a couple ways to explore. 00:31:08.060 --> 00:31:08.840 Yeah, that's pretty cool. 00:31:08.840 --> 00:31:12.240 So you mentioned Windows subsystem for Linux, WSL. 00:31:12.240 --> 00:31:18.460 Maybe people don't know about that, but there's also was a pretty big announcement here, I think, around that as well, right? 00:31:18.460 --> 00:31:22.340 That that's, like, proper Linux, not some kind of emulator or something? 00:31:22.640 --> 00:31:34.680 Yeah, so the way WSL started, it was a Linux kernel or Ubuntu image that you could run, and it was, they sort of shimmed out all the syscall APIs to call into Windows kernel stuff, right? 00:31:34.680 --> 00:31:39.440 I mean, that was pretty neat, but, you know, the file system performance was a little bit poor with that. 00:31:39.440 --> 00:31:44.180 Just, you know, it wasn't, these two things weren't really meant to necessarily talk like that, right? 00:31:44.180 --> 00:31:57.300 So they had built, we've announced a new version of WSL that's more like a very lightweight VM, where it runs a full Linux kernel, and it's, they're saying it's, like, 20 times faster in a lot of cases. 00:31:57.300 --> 00:31:58.020 Oh, that's pretty cool. 00:31:58.020 --> 00:32:01.320 You don't have that, you know, interopting between the two operating systems. 00:32:01.320 --> 00:32:03.860 Yeah, what are some of the use cases people have for using that? 00:32:03.860 --> 00:32:04.880 Like, why would they use it? 00:32:04.980 --> 00:32:13.600 Interestingly, most Python developers, the majority, well, not the majority, roughly 50% of them are on Windows, but a lot of them also deploy to Linux environments, right? 00:32:13.600 --> 00:32:14.360 Right, right. 00:32:14.360 --> 00:32:16.520 Dev on Windows, push to Linux. 00:32:16.520 --> 00:32:17.920 Yeah, like Linux servers, right? 00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:20.200 So a lot of their tool chain is in Linux, right? 00:32:20.200 --> 00:32:24.220 And you want to, you know, LS and Grap and SED and OCK and all that stuff. 00:32:24.220 --> 00:32:25.780 You want to be able to just kind of use that, right? 00:32:25.780 --> 00:32:31.440 So it's really given me a good Bash shell experience where I can apt-get install all the things I need. 00:32:31.440 --> 00:32:37.340 I can, you know, install Python and all that stuff, but still be able to use the UI, the user interface of Windows. 00:32:37.340 --> 00:32:38.680 Okay, yeah, that's pretty cool. 00:32:39.100 --> 00:32:48.680 Steve Dower, one of your co-workers, gave a really cool presentation at PyCon that was entitled something like, Python on Windows is okay, actually. 00:32:48.680 --> 00:32:49.220 Yep. 00:32:49.220 --> 00:32:51.820 And it was a really interesting talk. 00:32:51.820 --> 00:32:53.400 People should definitely go check it out. 00:32:53.400 --> 00:33:02.260 But some of the cool things he talked about was, I guess, you know, 60-ish percent of Python developers are using Windows. 00:33:02.260 --> 00:33:05.520 Like, it's quite a high number of how many people are actually using Windows. 00:33:06.000 --> 00:33:14.500 But he made the point that if you look around the room, like, there's the conference reality and there's real reality of, like, sort of tooling and technology distribution. 00:33:14.500 --> 00:33:17.560 And conference reality says most people have Macs. 00:33:17.560 --> 00:33:18.620 A few of them have Linux. 00:33:18.620 --> 00:33:23.200 And there's a couple people with, like, a Surface or whatever running Windows. 00:33:23.200 --> 00:33:27.100 But generally, it's, you know, the POSIX side of the world. 00:33:27.100 --> 00:33:29.580 But if you actually look at the stats, it's not. 00:33:29.580 --> 00:33:32.280 And he talked about why is that, right? 00:33:32.360 --> 00:33:42.300 Why aren't more of the Windows developers at PyCon and feeling like they're part of the community, not just, you know, using the tooling, but actually, like, part of the Python community. 00:33:42.300 --> 00:33:43.320 And I don't know. 00:33:43.320 --> 00:33:46.460 He had some pretty interesting ideas and solutions he threw out there. 00:33:46.460 --> 00:33:47.540 But what do you think about that? 00:33:47.540 --> 00:33:50.020 I definitely agree with the stats. 00:33:50.020 --> 00:33:51.700 And I was at his talk as well. 00:33:52.000 --> 00:34:04.000 And, you know, there's a lot of maybe hidden people out there who are just, you know, trying to learn Python or trying to get their job done or, you know, and they're all just, you know, struggling to use the tools. 00:34:04.000 --> 00:34:08.300 And, you know, we're doing as much as we can from Microsoft to make Python easy to use on Windows. 00:34:08.300 --> 00:34:16.080 But then, you know, it's up to kind of the package authors to think, hey, it's not just, you know, here's my Mac Linux instructions. 00:34:16.080 --> 00:34:19.340 I need to actually test this on Windows and make sure it works on Windows. 00:34:19.340 --> 00:34:30.340 Because there's a lot of people who maybe can't afford to fly to conferences or who aren't, you know, kind of up in all the high tech kind of stuff that we all live and breathe in every day. 00:34:30.540 --> 00:34:32.280 Right. Well, maybe they didn't choose Python. 00:34:32.280 --> 00:34:34.720 Maybe their job chose Python for them. 00:34:34.720 --> 00:34:35.220 Yeah. 00:34:35.220 --> 00:34:38.400 Right. Like they got a job to work as a Java developer. 00:34:38.400 --> 00:34:46.420 But then somebody said, well, we need you to maintain this Python project because, you know, Sarah, who was working on it, has moved on. 00:34:46.420 --> 00:34:47.600 And now someone's got to take it over. 00:34:47.600 --> 00:34:48.280 So you took it over. 00:34:48.280 --> 00:34:51.020 And they're now in, you know, working with these packages. 00:34:51.020 --> 00:34:54.900 And they didn't necessarily decide, you know, to like start in that place. 00:34:54.900 --> 00:34:56.420 Right. That's a different perspective, I think. 00:34:56.420 --> 00:34:57.180 That's possible. 00:34:57.180 --> 00:35:00.440 And there's also a lot of just think about a lot of people use Python. 00:35:00.440 --> 00:35:01.720 Python for information work. 00:35:01.720 --> 00:35:02.120 Right. 00:35:02.120 --> 00:35:06.360 Like it's sort of, you know, I'm trying to crunch some numbers at my insurance company. 00:35:06.360 --> 00:35:06.700 Right. 00:35:06.700 --> 00:35:10.380 Like, you know, and I'm using Windows desktop to do a lot of that stuff. 00:35:10.380 --> 00:35:17.680 Python might be something that I'm, especially these days, a lot of people are using Python just to get their jobs done. 00:35:17.680 --> 00:35:19.400 Maybe they're not primarily programmers even. 00:35:19.400 --> 00:35:19.620 Right. 00:35:19.620 --> 00:35:22.420 I think that's a really big source of the growth of Python. 00:35:22.420 --> 00:35:26.200 It's not like more websites are being built in Python necessarily. 00:35:26.540 --> 00:35:33.020 It's that Python is becoming the tool that people who are not developers are using. 00:35:33.020 --> 00:35:34.960 I think it's growing in both, right? 00:35:34.960 --> 00:35:35.540 Yeah, yeah. 00:35:35.540 --> 00:35:35.960 I agree. 00:35:35.960 --> 00:35:52.600 It's both becoming a, like, really advanced, capable language for, you know, things like data science and machine learning, as well as still easy to approach for that person who's just trying to get their job done and trying to compute some numbers and, you know, maybe script a few things to make their lives easier. 00:35:52.740 --> 00:35:52.940 Right. 00:35:52.940 --> 00:35:53.360 Absolutely. 00:35:53.360 --> 00:35:57.560 I was talking at a dinner last night with some folks who were not super familiar with Python. 00:35:57.560 --> 00:35:58.860 They've been doing more JavaScript. 00:35:58.860 --> 00:36:01.800 I mean, they knew of Python, but not deeply, right? 00:36:01.800 --> 00:36:07.020 They were asking me, you know, why do you think Python has become the de facto language for data science? 00:36:07.020 --> 00:36:09.480 And maybe I'll throw that question out to you. 00:36:09.480 --> 00:36:10.900 Like, what do you think? 00:36:10.900 --> 00:36:20.220 My simple reaction when I heard it was a popular language for data science was like, well, of course, I mean, you got, like, the maps and the array splices and, like, all that stuff. 00:36:20.220 --> 00:36:26.740 And I just remember with Python, you can, I could always do something with just a few lines of code, maybe, like, 80 lines of code. 00:36:26.740 --> 00:36:28.840 That would take me a thousand lines of code in another language. 00:36:28.840 --> 00:36:30.940 And I'm just like, wow, I can't believe I did all that. 00:36:30.940 --> 00:36:31.440 You know what I mean? 00:36:31.540 --> 00:36:38.760 And when you put that together with something like data science plus the really good notation for manipulating arrays and stuff like that, I think it just makes sense. 00:36:38.760 --> 00:36:50.620 And then you have libraries like Pandas and NumPy that came along and actually made it so you could work with larger data sets relatively efficiently and express a lot of stuff that other languages don't really have. 00:36:50.620 --> 00:36:51.720 And TensorFlow and what? 00:36:51.720 --> 00:36:56.400 And, well, NumPy even that, you know, has the performance of C, basically, right? 00:36:56.400 --> 00:36:57.340 Or GPUs. 00:36:57.340 --> 00:36:59.380 But you don't have to write C directly programming? 00:36:59.440 --> 00:37:04.300 Data scientists aren't necessarily, like, super top programmers either. 00:37:04.300 --> 00:37:07.140 They don't know necessarily all the engineering best practices. 00:37:07.140 --> 00:37:11.060 So having a language that's kind of really approachable, you know, for them, I think, really helps. 00:37:11.060 --> 00:37:13.880 I was thinking, look, it's a language that's simple to get started. 00:37:13.880 --> 00:37:16.920 You can kind of get your stuff going, but you don't run out of speed. 00:37:16.920 --> 00:37:17.860 You've got all these libraries. 00:37:17.860 --> 00:37:21.760 I think it's pretty interesting that it's kind of taken over that space. 00:37:21.760 --> 00:37:28.540 But to think about why that is, I think there's a few things that happen, like the creation of Python notebooks, for example, 00:37:28.820 --> 00:37:30.940 and some of the tooling, but also just the language. 00:37:30.940 --> 00:37:35.040 Before I joined the Python team at Microsoft, there's an instance where we're trying to crunch some data. 00:37:35.040 --> 00:37:39.880 And this guy who just came out of school, like, brought in Jupyter notebooks and pandas and all this stuff. 00:37:39.880 --> 00:37:42.820 And I was like, whoa, Python's changed a lot since I last used it, right? 00:37:42.820 --> 00:37:43.240 Exactly. 00:37:43.240 --> 00:37:44.700 And so that got me really excited about the language again. 00:37:44.700 --> 00:37:45.060 Yeah. 00:37:45.060 --> 00:37:45.820 That's super cool. 00:37:45.880 --> 00:37:46.000 Yeah. 00:37:46.000 --> 00:37:48.500 It's got so many interesting use cases. 00:37:48.500 --> 00:37:51.560 And different people use it so differently, right? 00:37:51.560 --> 00:37:55.880 Like, my first reaction to I need to write some code is not fire up Jupyter and create a notebook. 00:37:55.880 --> 00:38:03.120 And poke around is like, I'm going to create a project with tests and coverage and these files and architecture and layers. 00:38:03.120 --> 00:38:04.700 And it's totally valid. 00:38:04.700 --> 00:38:05.980 It's just different use cases. 00:38:06.140 --> 00:38:10.140 Yeah, I like that acceptance of kind of even if you're not doing Python correctly, it's still fine. 00:38:10.140 --> 00:38:10.360 Yeah. 00:38:10.360 --> 00:38:10.640 Right? 00:38:10.640 --> 00:38:13.400 Like, there's really, to me, there's no correct way of using Python. 00:38:13.400 --> 00:38:16.500 The way to use it is the one that gets your job done as quickly as possible. 00:38:16.500 --> 00:38:17.420 Yeah, yeah, for sure. 00:38:18.300 --> 00:38:23.420 So, there's a couple of other things I want to talk to you about VS Code while you hear that I think is pretty awesome. 00:38:23.420 --> 00:38:25.940 We talked about machine learning and AI. 00:38:25.940 --> 00:38:27.600 So, I guess I'll start with that one. 00:38:27.600 --> 00:38:29.200 So, let's talk about IntelliCode. 00:38:29.200 --> 00:38:33.120 So, we have autocomplete in general. 00:38:33.120 --> 00:38:34.760 We have IntelliSense. 00:38:34.760 --> 00:38:39.700 It's kind of like Microsoft's terminology for this autocomplete idea, right? 00:38:39.700 --> 00:38:40.020 Mm-hmm. 00:38:40.020 --> 00:38:43.320 And then IntelliCode is something different, right? 00:38:43.320 --> 00:38:50.760 Back at the EuroPython conference last year, we launched the IntelliCode extension in VS Code, and it only supported Python. 00:38:50.760 --> 00:38:56.560 So, what IntelliCode is machine learning AI-assisted autocompletions, right? 00:38:56.560 --> 00:38:58.840 So, we scour a bunch of open-source databases. 00:38:58.840 --> 00:39:03.340 We find what are the common code patterns, and then we build this model. 00:39:03.340 --> 00:39:05.820 And then if you install the IntelliCode extension, you get that model. 00:39:05.820 --> 00:39:11.620 And then as you're typing, it will predict based on your current code's context what the most likely autocompletion is. 00:39:11.620 --> 00:39:12.280 That's super cool. 00:39:12.280 --> 00:39:16.960 Like, traditional autocomplete is alphabetical, probably, right? 00:39:16.960 --> 00:39:17.440 Or top five. 00:39:17.440 --> 00:39:18.460 Yeah, yeah. 00:39:18.460 --> 00:39:20.880 I mean, but it doesn't really know, right? 00:39:20.880 --> 00:39:26.260 It just says, well, these are the attributes of this object or this module or whatever. 00:39:26.260 --> 00:39:27.540 Here they are. 00:39:27.540 --> 00:39:29.000 Go, we're going to try to help you, right? 00:39:29.000 --> 00:39:30.440 And maybe substring search, right? 00:39:30.440 --> 00:39:36.360 Like, if you type AE, it'll have, like, argument exception will show up because it puts those together or something. 00:39:36.360 --> 00:39:40.560 But it doesn't say, well, it looks like you're in the context of a with statement. 00:39:40.560 --> 00:39:44.020 And you've opened a file, and this is the file pointer thing. 00:39:44.240 --> 00:39:49.580 So if I say dot now, you probably want to read from it or write from it versus, you know, I don't know, whatever else, right? 00:39:49.580 --> 00:39:50.460 Yeah, exactly. 00:39:50.460 --> 00:39:51.040 That's pretty awesome. 00:39:51.220 --> 00:39:57.540 If you actually look at the IntelliCode extension page, there's an animated GIF, one of the TensorFlow 1.0 getting started examples. 00:39:57.540 --> 00:40:02.480 And then it just predicts every single dot, the right thing to press, and you press enter, and it just works. 00:40:02.480 --> 00:40:03.220 It's kind of magical. 00:40:03.220 --> 00:40:03.780 It's pretty insane. 00:40:03.780 --> 00:40:06.060 So it's kind of like that game you can play. 00:40:06.060 --> 00:40:11.740 Like, if you start to text something on, like, an iPhone or whatever, where they suggest a few words, and if you just keep hitting… 00:40:11.740 --> 00:40:13.500 You just keep pressing it and it writes a sentence out for you. 00:40:13.500 --> 00:40:14.440 Yeah, it's like that. 00:40:14.440 --> 00:40:15.180 Right. 00:40:15.580 --> 00:40:18.540 Honey, I'm going to be late from work, but I'm stopping by the store to get milk. 00:40:18.540 --> 00:40:19.760 It's like, how did that happen, right? 00:40:19.760 --> 00:40:23.420 But whoops, I wrote a TensorFlow program instead. 00:40:23.420 --> 00:40:23.940 Yeah, exactly. 00:40:23.940 --> 00:40:25.280 Okay, so I can just go get that now. 00:40:25.280 --> 00:40:26.020 That's been out for a while? 00:40:26.020 --> 00:40:26.760 Yeah, it's been out. 00:40:26.760 --> 00:40:27.540 And it just… 00:40:27.540 --> 00:40:32.200 So we first launched that preview of that at Europython, and we just GA'd IntelliCode today. 00:40:32.200 --> 00:40:34.700 And initially for VS Code, it was just Python. 00:40:34.700 --> 00:40:39.280 And now we've added, like, TypeScript, JavaScript, and a few other languages there. 00:40:39.380 --> 00:40:40.780 Yeah, so how does it know? 00:40:40.780 --> 00:40:43.540 You said you went through GitHub and stuff. 00:40:43.540 --> 00:40:44.380 Like, what's the story? 00:40:44.380 --> 00:40:47.300 It analyzes, like, the usage of packages, or what's it do? 00:40:47.300 --> 00:40:49.560 I don't know the specifics of the model. 00:40:49.560 --> 00:40:51.540 That's kind of our data science team figured it out. 00:40:51.540 --> 00:40:55.560 But it looks at the usages around where your current code is. 00:40:55.560 --> 00:40:59.360 So it looks around the surrounding area to see what code is being used around that. 00:40:59.360 --> 00:41:06.380 And then based on patterns it's seen on GitHub, the model's able to infer what comes next. 00:41:06.380 --> 00:41:09.360 It's one of those things where it's just sort of like all these layers and things like that. 00:41:09.360 --> 00:41:10.680 You don't know exactly how it works, right? 00:41:10.680 --> 00:41:11.360 It's AI, right? 00:41:11.360 --> 00:41:11.620 Yeah. 00:41:11.620 --> 00:41:13.440 Tell me what you want, not what you want me to do. 00:41:13.440 --> 00:41:13.940 Exactly. 00:41:13.940 --> 00:41:15.000 Don't ask how I did it. 00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:16.200 I'll just tell you what you need. 00:41:16.200 --> 00:41:20.540 So I think it's interesting, you know, like, even 20 years ago, people were saying, 00:41:20.540 --> 00:41:22.600 oh, no, there's not going to be programmers anymore. 00:41:22.600 --> 00:41:26.500 It's just going to be, like, sort of business people dragging, like, boxes around. 00:41:26.500 --> 00:41:28.860 And maybe the AI stuff is going to come along. 00:41:28.860 --> 00:41:32.780 And I feel like that's absolutely not the case these days, right? 00:41:32.780 --> 00:41:34.460 Like, there's plenty more code to be written. 00:41:34.460 --> 00:41:39.040 But stories like this, or tools like this, where it's, like, assisting. 00:41:39.260 --> 00:41:40.180 It's an accelerator, right? 00:41:40.180 --> 00:41:41.100 It's an accelerator, right? 00:41:41.100 --> 00:41:46.540 I feel like software development has both gotten easier and harder, you know, over the last 00:41:46.540 --> 00:41:47.260 10 or 20 years. 00:41:47.260 --> 00:41:50.820 Like, 20 years ago, the tools were way less good. 00:41:50.820 --> 00:41:52.280 There was no stack overflow. 00:41:52.280 --> 00:41:54.780 The internet was not much help. 00:41:54.780 --> 00:41:57.220 Or, you know, even at some point, it didn't exist, right? 00:41:57.220 --> 00:41:59.020 You had to go for a round or whatever. 00:41:59.440 --> 00:42:02.680 So the types of things we tried to solve with software, right? 00:42:02.680 --> 00:42:04.080 We didn't have the cloud, for example. 00:42:04.080 --> 00:42:06.360 They were smaller. 00:42:06.360 --> 00:42:07.660 It was harder to solve them. 00:42:07.660 --> 00:42:09.260 But we, like, knew they were hard. 00:42:09.260 --> 00:42:10.980 So we attempted smaller problems. 00:42:10.980 --> 00:42:13.000 Now we attempt to solve bigger problems. 00:42:13.000 --> 00:42:14.040 But we have better tools. 00:42:14.040 --> 00:42:16.420 I feel like there's this kind of, like, tension. 00:42:16.420 --> 00:42:18.480 Like, it's sort of about as hard as it used to be. 00:42:18.480 --> 00:42:19.800 But we can do way more. 00:42:19.800 --> 00:42:20.500 What do you think? 00:42:20.600 --> 00:42:24.520 Yeah, I mean, certainly, I think you used to be able to print out a book on programming 00:42:24.520 --> 00:42:25.360 or whatever. 00:42:25.360 --> 00:42:27.520 Like, you know, have that reference guide beside your desk. 00:42:27.520 --> 00:42:29.160 And that's just not possible today, right? 00:42:29.160 --> 00:42:29.600 Right. 00:42:29.600 --> 00:42:33.200 And I actually think about, when I think about the, like, technology becoming harder, I think 00:42:33.200 --> 00:42:35.320 about things like containers, right? 00:42:35.320 --> 00:42:37.360 Like, hey, it allows me to get all these benefits. 00:42:37.360 --> 00:42:40.660 But then, oh my gosh, it's so much harder to work with, right? 00:42:40.660 --> 00:42:42.140 Now I got to know about Docker files. 00:42:42.140 --> 00:42:45.600 And I also got to know about Linux and Windows or Linux and Mac, maybe. 00:42:45.600 --> 00:42:49.320 And things like React, for example, where it's like, wow, it's a super great programming 00:42:49.320 --> 00:42:53.520 model, but like, you got an npm and Babel and TransPile and JSX. 00:42:53.520 --> 00:42:54.480 And like, what is happening? 00:42:54.480 --> 00:42:57.880 Where's my just, you know, JavaScript source equals or whatever? 00:42:57.880 --> 00:42:58.320 Yeah. 00:42:58.320 --> 00:43:02.620 So, I mean, I think the key is if you can sort of get past the tooling complexity and get 00:43:02.620 --> 00:43:06.500 to that, once you sort of get in that flow of, okay, I've got everything set up and it's 00:43:06.500 --> 00:43:09.220 working, like, we can really do some awesome stuff. 00:43:09.220 --> 00:43:13.020 But then I think it's really hard for beginners to get into that because there's like this learning 00:43:13.020 --> 00:43:13.320 curve. 00:43:13.320 --> 00:43:16.000 I've got to learn the last 20 years of advancement in technology. 00:43:18.040 --> 00:43:21.680 This portion of Talk Python To Me is sponsored by Backlog from NewLab. 00:43:21.680 --> 00:43:26.280 Developers know the importance of organization and efficiency when it comes to collaborating 00:43:26.280 --> 00:43:26.820 on a team. 00:43:26.820 --> 00:43:31.220 And Backlog is the perfect collaborative task management software for your team. 00:43:31.220 --> 00:43:36.000 With Backlog, you can create tasks, track bugs, make changes, give feedback, and have team 00:43:36.000 --> 00:43:37.760 conversations right next to your code. 00:43:37.760 --> 00:43:41.000 You track progress with features like Gantt and burndown charts. 00:43:41.000 --> 00:43:44.380 You document your processes right alongside your wikis. 00:43:44.500 --> 00:43:48.120 You can integrate with the tools used every day like Slack, JIRA, and Google Sheets. 00:43:48.120 --> 00:43:51.880 You can automatically register issues from email or web form submissions. 00:43:51.880 --> 00:43:56.000 Take your work on the go using their top rated mobile apps available on Android and iOS. 00:43:56.000 --> 00:44:02.700 Try Backlog for your team for free for 30 days using our special URL at talkpython.fm slash 00:44:02.700 --> 00:44:03.100 backlog. 00:44:03.420 --> 00:44:05.760 That's talkpython.fm/backlog. 00:44:07.380 --> 00:44:10.300 The last other one that I said I was going to ask you about too, the other one that I 00:44:10.300 --> 00:44:15.180 thought is pretty cool that I've wanted for a long time in editing is something called 00:44:15.180 --> 00:44:16.380 LiveShare, I think. 00:44:16.380 --> 00:44:19.000 I've done a lot of like, hey, let's work on this together. 00:44:19.000 --> 00:44:23.400 So I'm going to set up a Zoom meeting and I'll share my screen or Skype and we'll share 00:44:23.400 --> 00:44:25.180 the screen or who knows how this is going to happen. 00:44:25.180 --> 00:44:28.920 But it probably involves sharing a screen and who's typing right now. 00:44:28.920 --> 00:44:29.900 Oh, I need to type that. 00:44:29.900 --> 00:44:32.260 Let me switch back to your computer and you'd share your screen. 00:44:32.560 --> 00:44:34.020 Or go up two lines there. 00:44:34.020 --> 00:44:35.040 No, one character over. 00:44:35.040 --> 00:44:35.900 One character over. 00:44:35.900 --> 00:44:37.200 No, that one, this one. 00:44:37.200 --> 00:44:40.680 And that's the point where you're like, why are they not showing line numbers in their 00:44:40.680 --> 00:44:40.960 editor? 00:44:40.960 --> 00:44:41.420 Come on. 00:44:41.420 --> 00:44:41.940 Yeah, yeah. 00:44:41.940 --> 00:44:43.940 I could just say line 132 and we'd be done. 00:44:43.940 --> 00:44:45.160 But no, up, up, up. 00:44:45.160 --> 00:44:45.740 Yeah, exactly. 00:44:45.740 --> 00:44:49.400 So this LiveShare stuff is pretty cool and it's kind of like that, right? 00:44:49.400 --> 00:44:49.720 Yes. 00:44:49.720 --> 00:44:52.380 The way it works is somebody can start a LiveShare session. 00:44:52.380 --> 00:44:55.440 So first of all, you install the VS LiveShare extension. 00:44:55.440 --> 00:44:57.440 It works on both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. 00:44:57.440 --> 00:44:59.120 You start a collaboration session. 00:44:59.120 --> 00:45:00.100 You invite someone to join. 00:45:00.280 --> 00:45:05.780 And then when they join, they're sort of connected into your development environment. 00:45:05.780 --> 00:45:07.600 They can see all the files you have open. 00:45:07.600 --> 00:45:10.560 They can, you know, if they start typing, they'll get IntelliSense. 00:45:10.560 --> 00:45:13.080 They can collaboratively debug with you. 00:45:13.080 --> 00:45:17.120 You can choose to follow each other or go explore the code base kind of on your own and come back. 00:45:17.120 --> 00:45:19.680 You can sort of like click a follow button and things like that. 00:45:19.680 --> 00:45:22.680 Is that a VS Code only thing or does it work with other stuff? 00:45:22.680 --> 00:45:24.060 It works with Visual Studio as well. 00:45:24.060 --> 00:45:25.120 The full Visual Studio. 00:45:25.120 --> 00:45:26.520 So I get this question all the time. 00:45:26.520 --> 00:45:27.460 You know, can I collaborate? 00:45:27.460 --> 00:45:29.720 Can I have a Windows machine and have a Mac join that? 00:45:29.800 --> 00:45:33.220 Yes, you can collaborate across platforms and machines and stuff like that. 00:45:33.220 --> 00:45:40.060 So, I mean, the cool thing, it really helps you if you can have someone come in and look at the code and then they can just type in the code that they want to write. 00:45:40.060 --> 00:45:40.760 You know what I mean? 00:45:40.760 --> 00:45:43.740 And you can have multiple people joining in on that. 00:45:43.740 --> 00:45:44.620 So it's really cool. 00:45:44.620 --> 00:45:48.400 I just used it the other day with a coworker when we're building our demos for PyCon and Build. 00:45:48.400 --> 00:45:49.960 And I was just like, wow, this. 00:45:50.240 --> 00:45:51.260 Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. 00:45:51.260 --> 00:45:52.060 Can you do it? 00:45:52.060 --> 00:45:54.000 Is it like pretty useful for a code review? 00:45:54.000 --> 00:45:54.740 Something like that? 00:45:54.740 --> 00:45:55.680 Yeah. 00:45:55.680 --> 00:45:56.220 Yeah. 00:45:56.220 --> 00:45:57.360 Do you want to kind of explore around? 00:45:57.360 --> 00:45:57.620 Okay. 00:45:57.620 --> 00:45:58.920 Yeah. 00:45:58.920 --> 00:46:00.300 That sounds like a pretty cool feature. 00:46:00.300 --> 00:46:00.900 Definitely. 00:46:01.280 --> 00:46:03.660 So we're getting pretty short on time. 00:46:03.660 --> 00:46:06.900 So I guess let me just ask you a few sort of closing out questions. 00:46:06.900 --> 00:46:16.340 One of the things that was cool at PyCon, and I think would be cool to see if it's showing up over here at this conference, is the sprints. 00:46:16.580 --> 00:46:16.940 Right? 00:46:16.940 --> 00:46:26.640 At the end of the last couple days of PyCon, there's a few other days where folks who are maybe working on Flask or SQLAlchemy, they stick around and collaboratively. 00:46:26.640 --> 00:46:27.300 Jam on it. 00:46:27.300 --> 00:46:28.220 Jam on it, right? 00:46:28.220 --> 00:46:28.860 Jam on it. 00:46:28.860 --> 00:46:32.160 Maybe learn even how to become a contributor to that project or whatever. 00:46:32.160 --> 00:46:34.100 It'd be cool if you guys did something like that here. 00:46:34.100 --> 00:46:35.620 That's the first time someone's brought it up. 00:46:35.620 --> 00:46:36.580 I actually think you're right. 00:46:36.580 --> 00:46:37.280 It's a cool idea. 00:46:37.280 --> 00:46:38.860 I'll recommend it. 00:46:38.860 --> 00:46:39.120 Yeah. 00:46:39.120 --> 00:46:46.560 But one thing, to give you guys props, one thing that was really cool here is out on the expo floor, there's like maybe, I don't know, 20, 30, 40. 00:46:46.560 --> 00:46:47.080 It's like maybe computers. 00:46:47.080 --> 00:46:49.800 And it said, this section is reserved for students. 00:46:49.800 --> 00:46:58.740 And any student that walked by could sit down and start working on some projects using the computers there for, I think there was some IoT or robotic stuff going on. 00:46:58.740 --> 00:47:01.760 But I feel like that's super cool and other conferences should adopt that. 00:47:01.760 --> 00:47:03.760 Like at PyCon, there's some stuff like that. 00:47:03.760 --> 00:47:08.600 But it's usually in a back room, closed off, and you had to know about it in advance and sign up for it. 00:47:08.600 --> 00:47:13.340 It's not like it was happening in public and all the other students would happen upon it, right? 00:47:13.340 --> 00:47:13.640 Yeah. 00:47:13.780 --> 00:47:17.600 I mean, they started doing the mentored sprints this year at PyCon to start bringing more people in. 00:47:17.600 --> 00:47:19.220 The students thing was new this year. 00:47:19.220 --> 00:47:20.100 And I just love it. 00:47:20.100 --> 00:47:20.960 I think it's a great idea. 00:47:20.960 --> 00:47:29.880 And anything we could do to get people learning programming at a younger age helps us all move forward quicker. 00:47:29.880 --> 00:47:32.160 But also, I think it does a lot to increase the diversity. 00:47:32.160 --> 00:47:32.660 Yeah. 00:47:32.660 --> 00:47:33.000 Yeah. 00:47:33.040 --> 00:47:35.600 People can kind of stumble upon it when they're young and go, oh, this is cool. 00:47:35.600 --> 00:47:36.180 I like this. 00:47:36.180 --> 00:47:36.480 You know? 00:47:36.480 --> 00:47:36.700 Yeah. 00:47:36.700 --> 00:47:37.620 It's super cool. 00:47:37.620 --> 00:47:42.060 And programming is usually pretty easy with like a few little sharp edges. 00:47:42.060 --> 00:47:43.720 And you're like, why does this not work? 00:47:43.720 --> 00:47:44.680 Why can't I get over this? 00:47:44.680 --> 00:47:46.660 And if someone's there, just go like the mentored sprints. 00:47:46.660 --> 00:47:47.600 Just click this button there. 00:47:47.600 --> 00:47:47.820 Yeah. 00:47:47.820 --> 00:47:49.580 Like, oh, you've got to run this command first. 00:47:49.580 --> 00:47:51.980 Oh, you didn't activate your virtual environment or whatever, right? 00:47:51.980 --> 00:47:53.200 Like then it'll be smooth, right? 00:47:53.200 --> 00:47:56.060 Just a little bit of initial help, I think, would be great. 00:47:56.060 --> 00:47:56.560 Yeah. 00:47:56.560 --> 00:47:56.620 Yeah. 00:47:56.620 --> 00:47:57.080 Pretty cool. 00:47:57.220 --> 00:47:59.900 So what's your favorite thing here, Bill? 00:47:59.900 --> 00:48:03.320 Your favorite announcement or thing that came out around the conference? 00:48:03.320 --> 00:48:05.860 I think the WSL 2 was definitely a highlight. 00:48:05.860 --> 00:48:07.920 Good file system performance, things like that. 00:48:07.920 --> 00:48:09.840 The new Windows terminal, right? 00:48:09.840 --> 00:48:10.120 Yeah. 00:48:10.120 --> 00:48:11.020 And we haven't talked about that. 00:48:11.020 --> 00:48:12.560 And I haven't had a chance to look at it. 00:48:12.560 --> 00:48:13.600 But tell us about it. 00:48:13.600 --> 00:48:15.080 It sounds like Command Prompt got better. 00:48:15.080 --> 00:48:17.120 And it's actually, they put the code up on GitHub. 00:48:17.120 --> 00:48:18.160 It's open source. 00:48:18.160 --> 00:48:19.720 But it's like tabbed. 00:48:19.720 --> 00:48:21.280 It looks a lot nicer. 00:48:21.280 --> 00:48:22.820 It's got full Unicode support. 00:48:23.120 --> 00:48:27.640 And you can kind of switch between a WSL or a Windows command prompt. 00:48:27.640 --> 00:48:28.020 Right. 00:48:28.020 --> 00:48:32.420 So this is not PowerShell, not a separate PowerShell, like blue window. 00:48:32.420 --> 00:48:35.340 But like the traditional CMD one is now better. 00:48:35.340 --> 00:48:36.120 Is that what it is? 00:48:36.120 --> 00:48:36.660 Yes. 00:48:36.660 --> 00:48:38.100 It might support PowerShell too. 00:48:38.100 --> 00:48:40.040 I haven't caught up on all I built just yet to be honest. 00:48:40.040 --> 00:48:44.980 But the one thing, we also announced a cloud hosted developer environments where it's a 00:48:44.980 --> 00:48:45.520 preview right now. 00:48:45.520 --> 00:48:46.420 You have to sign up for it. 00:48:46.420 --> 00:48:48.500 But I'm really excited to see where that goes. 00:48:48.500 --> 00:48:48.960 What does that mean? 00:48:48.960 --> 00:48:52.980 You get like a remote terminal or is it this VS Code? 00:48:53.020 --> 00:48:54.660 Well, think about it, the VS Code remote. 00:48:54.660 --> 00:48:59.260 But then somebody also spins up a server for you as well that you can just click a button 00:48:59.260 --> 00:49:03.180 and get your environment pre-created, pre-provisioned for you in the cloud and just start working 00:49:03.180 --> 00:49:03.620 away on it. 00:49:03.620 --> 00:49:04.960 So I'm really excited to see where that goes. 00:49:04.960 --> 00:49:08.820 So if that sounds interesting to anyone, definitely sign up for the preview and check it out. 00:49:08.820 --> 00:49:09.120 That's cool. 00:49:09.120 --> 00:49:11.800 Does it work in a web browser or does it require something like VS Code? 00:49:11.800 --> 00:49:12.140 Both. 00:49:12.140 --> 00:49:12.680 Yeah. 00:49:12.680 --> 00:49:13.120 Okay, cool. 00:49:13.120 --> 00:49:15.500 So VS Code, I mean, there's so many things that we've announced here. 00:49:15.500 --> 00:49:17.560 The browser-based offering as well. 00:49:17.560 --> 00:49:17.800 Okay. 00:49:17.800 --> 00:49:18.500 Yeah, that's pretty cool. 00:49:18.500 --> 00:49:23.580 So the reason I ask is a lot of times people are trying to teach classes or run stuff, 00:49:23.580 --> 00:49:26.160 especially around schools and students, and they just have a Chromebook. 00:49:26.160 --> 00:49:29.100 And it's like, can you do Python on a Chromebook? 00:49:29.100 --> 00:49:30.440 How do you do that, right? 00:49:30.440 --> 00:49:30.780 Yeah. 00:49:30.780 --> 00:49:35.200 These sorts of remote environments that work in the browser are really awesome because 00:49:35.200 --> 00:49:37.440 then it makes it possible for all these kids to do programming. 00:49:37.440 --> 00:49:37.740 Yeah. 00:49:37.740 --> 00:49:42.540 I love that from the getting started angle as well as, say, I've got a super big, powerful 00:49:42.540 --> 00:49:47.160 development environment and I've got to spin up a bunch of them all the time and I just 00:49:47.160 --> 00:49:49.760 want to move from this one to that one to this one to that one. 00:49:49.760 --> 00:49:53.240 So at a really large scale at some of the larger companies, that's another area where that's 00:49:53.240 --> 00:49:53.760 really interesting. 00:49:53.760 --> 00:49:54.080 Okay. 00:49:54.080 --> 00:49:54.400 Yeah. 00:49:54.400 --> 00:49:54.860 Super cool. 00:49:54.860 --> 00:49:55.420 Super cool. 00:49:55.420 --> 00:49:55.780 All right. 00:49:55.780 --> 00:49:59.580 Well, I think that might use it up all our time, but not all the questions I had for 00:49:59.580 --> 00:49:59.740 you. 00:49:59.740 --> 00:50:03.120 So I'll ask you the final two questions before we wrap it up. 00:50:03.120 --> 00:50:08.280 Kind of know the answer to the first one, I'm guessing, but I'll ask it just for, I think 00:50:08.280 --> 00:50:08.800 it's always true. 00:50:08.800 --> 00:50:11.240 If you're going to write some Python code, what editor do you use? 00:50:11.240 --> 00:50:12.500 Obviously Visual Studio Code. 00:50:12.500 --> 00:50:12.800 Yeah. 00:50:12.800 --> 00:50:13.400 Right on. 00:50:13.400 --> 00:50:13.700 Okay. 00:50:13.700 --> 00:50:16.820 And notable PyPI package. 00:50:16.820 --> 00:50:18.760 So I just started playing with this today. 00:50:18.760 --> 00:50:22.660 I have a build talk later today, but I just started using TextBlob for doing sentiment analysis. 00:50:22.660 --> 00:50:22.880 Oh yeah. 00:50:22.880 --> 00:50:23.740 TextBlob is cool. 00:50:23.740 --> 00:50:24.020 Yeah. 00:50:24.020 --> 00:50:25.080 I just came across it as well. 00:50:25.200 --> 00:50:25.360 Yeah. 00:50:25.360 --> 00:50:27.860 And cause I was like, how do, it's the easiest way to do sentiment analysis. 00:50:27.860 --> 00:50:31.340 And I came across TextBlob and I'm like, wow, this code fits in one tweet. 00:50:31.340 --> 00:50:36.760 I can build a Flask API that returns, you know, positive or negative within, you know, a few 00:50:36.760 --> 00:50:37.160 lines of code. 00:50:37.160 --> 00:50:37.860 This is pretty awesome. 00:50:37.860 --> 00:50:38.140 Yeah. 00:50:38.140 --> 00:50:38.520 That's cool. 00:50:38.520 --> 00:50:44.920 Like, so people who don't know, TextBlob is like a simplified layer on top of NLTK and 00:50:44.920 --> 00:50:46.140 you can do all sorts of cool stuff. 00:50:46.140 --> 00:50:51.880 Like here's document and ask it for the sentences, ask it for the nouns, ask it for the sentiment of 00:50:51.880 --> 00:50:55.180 phrases, the number, like the unique words, a lot of cool, like, 00:50:55.180 --> 00:50:56.340 things that are real simple though, right? 00:50:56.340 --> 00:50:57.480 Yeah, exactly. 00:50:57.480 --> 00:50:59.700 I just started playing with it and it's pretty fun. 00:50:59.700 --> 00:51:00.060 Right on. 00:51:00.060 --> 00:51:00.420 All right. 00:51:00.420 --> 00:51:02.280 Well, final call to action. 00:51:02.280 --> 00:51:06.440 People maybe want to check out some of the things you talked about, like the insider remote 00:51:06.440 --> 00:51:08.560 Visual Studio Code stuff, something like that. 00:51:08.560 --> 00:51:09.140 How do they get started? 00:51:09.300 --> 00:51:12.580 So check out our Python blog, aka.ms slash Python blog. 00:51:12.580 --> 00:51:17.860 So we post, you know, all of our updates there, our monthly releases about the VS Code remote 00:51:17.860 --> 00:51:18.280 stuff. 00:51:18.280 --> 00:51:20.820 So if you just want to keep up to date with what we're doing, check that out. 00:51:20.820 --> 00:51:21.120 All right. 00:51:21.120 --> 00:51:21.840 Right on. 00:51:21.840 --> 00:51:23.100 Well, Dan, thanks for being on the show. 00:51:23.100 --> 00:51:23.860 It's great to chat with you. 00:51:23.860 --> 00:51:23.980 My pleasure. 00:51:23.980 --> 00:51:24.640 Great chat. 00:51:24.640 --> 00:51:25.880 You've got in person even. 00:51:25.880 --> 00:51:26.180 Yeah. 00:51:26.180 --> 00:51:26.760 This is awesome. 00:51:26.760 --> 00:51:27.080 Thanks. 00:51:27.080 --> 00:51:27.240 Yep. 00:51:27.240 --> 00:51:27.580 See you. 00:51:28.580 --> 00:51:31.080 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. 00:51:31.080 --> 00:51:36.200 Our guest on this episode was Dan Taylor, and it's been brought to you by Linode and Backlog. 00:51:36.200 --> 00:51:40.560 Linode is your go-to hosting for whatever you're building with Python. 00:51:40.560 --> 00:51:44.100 Get four months free at talkpython.fm/Linode. 00:51:44.100 --> 00:51:46.000 That's L-I-N-O-D-E. 00:51:46.000 --> 00:51:52.620 With Backlog, you can create tasks, track bugs, make changes, give feedback, and have team conversations 00:51:52.620 --> 00:51:53.980 right next to your code. 00:51:54.460 --> 00:52:00.400 Try Backlog for your team for free for 30 days using the special URL talkpython.fm slash 00:52:00.400 --> 00:52:00.940 Backlog. 00:52:00.940 --> 00:52:03.380 Want to level up your Python? 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