Microsoft has announced the Python Data Science Extension Pack for Visual Studio Code which is intended as a one-stop shop for doing data science work in Python. If, as a Python programmer, you don't already use VS Code, this is another good reason to adopt it. If you are new to Python it is the obvious starting point.

The 2024 Stack Overflow survey reports that 74% of professional developers use Visual Studio code. That finding was in response to a question where devs could choose more than one option but VS Code also came out as the most popular IDE for Python programmers in the JetBrains State of the Developer Ecosystem 2023 Survey where the question posed was, Which IDE /editor do you mostly use for Python development?

PyCharm is of course JetBrains proprietary Python IDE which perhaps explains its combined preponderance in this survey.

There's nothing new in the newly launched Python Data Science Extension Pack, but it is good to have them as a bundle. 

The first of the four components in the Python Data Science Extension Pack is the Python extension which lets developers use VS Code as a Python editor with all of VS Code's features. By default it installs both Pylance, which provides IntelliSense,  and the Python Debugger. It also provides support for  formatting, linting, code navigation, refactoring, together with variable explorer, test explorer, and more.

The Jupyter Extension provides basic notebook support for language kernels that are supported in Jupyter Notebooks, and allows any Python environment to be used as a Jupyter kernel.

GitHub Copilot is the AI pair programmer tool that helps you write code faster and smarter that we've reported on since its debut in 2021. Since then it has been widely welcomed by devs who find it boosts their productivity. Used within VS Code there are two extensions, GitHub Copilot which provides inline coding suggestions as you type and GitHub Copilot Chat, a companion extension that provides conversational AI assistance.

The fourth component, the Data Wrangler Extension for Visual Studio Code, has been available since the end of 2023 but this is the first time we've met it. It provides data viewing, cleaning and preparation for tabular datasets that is integrated into VS Code and VS Code Jupyter Notebooks. It provides a rich user interface to view and analyze your data and show insightful column statistics and visualizations.

• Mike James is both editor-in-chief of IProgrammer and a prolific author. VS Code is now his preferred code editor and is used throughout his Programmer's Python: Something Completely Different series of books and in his more recent title Extending & Embedding Python Using C.

More Information

VS Code Dev Website

Visual Studio Code Website

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