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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Of course. MS supports Python in Azure, too... they seem to be embracing Python in general into the Microsoft ecosystem.

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Microsoft's Merchant Server (precursor to Commerce Server) was primarily written in Python and shipped in 1996. This is due to the fact that they acquired eShop for the software, a company co-founded by Greg Stein (who is pretty well known in the Python community).

Python has been fairly well embraced by some parts of Microsoft for quite a while now, and while some of that support has come and gone over the years (eg. IronPython), they still have projects like Python Tools for Visual Studio which are very solid.

Dino Viehland, who works on Python Tools for Visual Studio, used to work on IronPython. No doubt knowledge gained implementing the language helps with implementing development tools...

This is all true. There were early ODBC drivers and COM wrappers for Python, too, back in this time period.

You can build Django apps in Visual Studio now. The end is nigh.

Yes Django developers can get your hourly dose of not responding alert bubbles, HRESULT crashes and upper case menus as well!

I spent a couple of hours with visual studio python tooling a couple of months ago and couldn't face it. Its not the extensions that are bad, it's just I've been using Visual Studio since 6.0 up to 2012 and it's just fucked me in the eye socket constantly since day one. I've only just got rid of the sympathy for the kidnapper of my mind.

I'm not exactly going to say that Visual Studio is heaven on Earth, but I can also say that I haven't seen unresponsive alert bubbles or HRESULT-based crashes since maybe 2005, and possibly the first version of VS.NET. I think you're being a little bit unfair here.

I agree. While I'm totally Visual Studio free now (since I don't like running VM on OS X), I haven't seen this type of instability in a LONG time.

While I definitely won't be using Visual Studio for web development (it just doesn't feel right to me), I wouldn't say Visual Studio is an awful product that should be avoided. Compared to VS 2005 (remember those days?), VS 2012 is far faster and much less of a pain to use. For anyone starting out with web development who has used VS before, it would probably work fine and suit their needs.

That is, unless your projects are giant. Then you might start running into a bit of unresponsiveness, but nothing worse than Sublime Text or comparable editors.

I do have giant projects (which is what I'm referring to) unfortunately.

Not a fat chance in hell I'll use Visual Studio over Sublime Text. However it is good that MS is at least attempting to accommodate the open source community.

Seems like a good sign.

That's good news. I wonder if this will lead to convergence in the Linux and Windows ecosystems? Generalized graphical frameworks and whatnot?

> I wonder if this will lead to convergence in the Linux and Windows ecosystems?

Most people who understand Microsoft's history sincerely hope not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Quote: ""Embrace, extend, and extinguish", also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors."

If they were embracing Python, they would replace PowerShell with Python. :)

PowerShell and Python both make fairly lousy CLIs out-of-the-box, and you can already talk to .NET objects in Python through either IronPython or pywin32's COM interop, depending on what you're up to. In other words: you can already use Python in place of PowerShell. Do so in good health, and be merry. :)

Every time you have to add a new component to a system to run your tools, a system administrator gets his wings.

PS is built in, Python isn't, so Python can't be used to 'bootstrap' anything from the ground up in Windows. If you're going to have to bootstrap in PS, why not just stick with it?

Because Windows is going away. Python experience is portable. Your tools have a chance of having some use after your last Windows box is turned off.

Windows on the desktop is going away? Pretty sure it will be around for many many years to come. I say this as a primarily mac household.

That said, yes, Python is a portable skill.

But python tools are not (by default) portable when they deal specifically with OS stuff. The paradigms are too different - you have to spend considerable amounts of time doing 'if os==linux:elif os==windows' if you want portability for that kind of thing.

And to say 'windows is going away' is hilarious - maybe in the Valley, but def. not in big orgs.

Or pre-install Python on Windows like in all the other operating systems.

Yeah, it takes like 15 seconds.

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