Visual studio and Python

Why write Python in Visual Studio?

That what I want to know, too.

IntelliSense? ActiveState Komodo does this. And it does it very well considering the potential complexity of trying to determine what identifiers are possibly valid in a dynamic language.

Debugger? No thanks. I haven't used it yet. [I should probably blog on the perils of debuggers.]

Project Management? GitHub seems to be it. Some IDE integration might be helpful, but the three common command-line operations -- git pull, git commit, and git push -- seem to cover an awful lot of bases.

I've been asked about Python IDEs -- more than once -- and my answer remains the same:

The IDE Doesn't Matter. 

One of the more shocking tech decisions I've seen is the development manager who bragged on the benefits of VB. The entire benefit was this: Visual Studio made the otherwise awful VB language acceptable.

The Visual Studio IDE was great. And it made up for the awful language.

Seriously.

The development manager went to to claim that until Eclipse had all the features of Visual Studio, they were sure that Java was not usable. To them, the IDE was the only decision criteria. As though code somehow doesn't have a long tail of support, analysis, and reverse engineering. 

Programming Language Popularity -- Update

I used to rely on the TIOBE Software Programming Community Index.

Today, I learned about the langpop site. The context was following an SD Times blog posting on Haskell. But I got distracted looking at language rankings and what it means to consulting companies.

[Until corrected, I was] particularly drawn to langpop's Amazon listing. It seems like everyone wants books on C, C++ and C#. All other languages are also-rans. Why? [I guessed] that it's because those languages are so (a) hard to work with and (b) are perceived as "old school" where print resources are more prevalent than on-line resources. [Turns out the rankings are screwed up. Dang.]

Marketplace

The langpop aggregate ranking is C, Java, C++, PHP, JavaScript, C# and Python. The TIOBE Community Index is Java, C, C++, PHP, VB, C#, Python.

Similar enough to confirm that a half-dozen languages dominate with two others fighting for position.

Years ago, one of our senior consultants made the case that we really have three fundamental tech-stacks into which our web services had to fit: VB/.Net, C#/.Net, and Java. Corporate IT doesn't demand a lot of PHP or Python from us.

Perhaps those are opportunities for growth. Or perhaps there isn't enough corporate IT demand for those frameworks.

Architecture? We don't need no stinking architecture! (Update)

Context: We're reverse engineering some bad VB application code.

What I saw. "This problem report pushed this module over the 64k limit for modules. Therefore all code used for XYZ has been removed from this module and placed in the new bas module XYZ."

What I learned. Good design -- irrelevant. Abstraction -- irrelevant. Layered architecture -- irrelevant. Conceptual Integrity of the design -- irrelevant. What actually mattered was VB's 64k module limit.

Consequence. Reverse engineering will be hard because I don't know what code is scattered around the rest of the code base. The number of global variables is truly awe-inspiring.

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Edit: Two additional gems: "Needed to split out another portion of this procedure due to "not enough memory" error on compile" and "This new sub added because of "Procedure too Large" compile error".

Some people should find jobs in a different industry. The module is 6000 lines of code, and apparently, it had no structure at all until it stopped compiling.