Visual Studio Code is a modular code editor, so extensions are mandatory. You use them to get essentials like language compilers, and useful tools like code formatters, linters, and profilers. Look closely, and you’ll even find an extension for emoji support.

VS Code’s marketplace holds roughly 20,000 extensions. But for years, there’s been a single unchallenged extension dominating the rankings. The most popular VS Code extension, at nearly double the downloads of its closest competitor (23 million and counting), is the Python language extension:

It’s no secret that Python is wildly popular. But the fact that Python trounces the popularity of Microsoft’s own languages in their own editor is no small feat. It’s also a development that didn’t seem possible just five years ago. Back then, Microsoft was still shaking off its reputation as a corporate dinosaur, a company tied to a dying world of desktop software, in love with the development tools of yesterday, and completely unable to play nicely with other people’s technology. The company was held in particular contempt in the world of open source software. (Calling open source a socialist cancer probably didn’t help.)

#vscode #programming #ide #python #microsoft