Python in Visual Studio Code – April 2019 Release
Overall I really like this extension and especially its interactive programming &#x2F; notebook features. I am a big fan of jupyter notebooks, and wrote my own version for Scala (it was more inspired by Mathematica since Juypter didn&#x27;t exist yet) a long long time ago.<p>However having all the output be in a dedicated window as this extension does, that allows for scrolling back in the order things were run rather than in the order they are laid out in the notebook is turning out to be better for some use cases. Also, it allows having the output side-by-side which takes better advantage of the horizontal to vertical pixel ratio of monitors.<p>Another thing I like is that editing cells as plain text using #%% to separate them is just a better more intuitive interface for a programmer  than having a bunch of separate text-areas (imho). And it nicely dodges all the padding and unnecessary white-space problems that a Jupyter notebook has compared to a mathematica one, allowing more information to fit on the screen.<p>For one downside: I haven&#x27;t ever used an extension that is so inclined to randomly pop up with tips and surveys while I am programming as this one. It&#x27;s incredibly annoying and I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to disable it. Including looking through the code on github, but don&#x27;t see anyway at all to do it.<p>It&#x27;s a catch-22 situation because VS Code doesn&#x27;t have the option to disable notifications like these, the person in charge of deciding if there should be a feature to prevent popups says that it&#x27;s an extension issue and to take it up with them. And the extension clearly doesn&#x27;t have the mindset that it is an issue and frankly I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s an extensions job to re-invent the wheel on this every time so I don&#x27;t blame them. They are using the tools they have as extension authors because it&#x27;s clearly not the extensions job to set the style of of notification deliver to the user, only that there is one to present, perhaps with an associated urgency level. The IDE ought to then deliver it in the manner most desired by it&#x27;s user.<p>Contrast this with Intellij which works around all of this by simply having a thought out system for notifications, wherein the user, can force them all to go to a log in a panel without a popup, which, for me is great because I&#x27;m coding, don&#x27;t knock me out of the zone!