I think it is really sad that Atom seems to fall victim to the Github acquisition by Microsoft. I am sure the Juno guys can move their IDE to another editor, anyone remembers Lighttable?
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I want those watches !
I used to use Juno on Lighttable, had no idea it was still around!
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That was the first polished Julia editing experience for me 
, good memories.
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GitHub has special video about VSCode in their 2020 event, but nothing is mentioned about Atom. 
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Please do the switch. I recently see my Atom runs huge on memory footprint when open a couples of projects. Hope that will be better with VS Code.
Features I like:
- in-line evaluation
- Full debugger as in Juno now
- Workspace of all the variables
- Code navigation (jump to …)
Need a good object viewer
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It is a pity that the proposal of v-i-s-h, or a similar project, wasn’t considered as an alternative to the abandoned atom editor as the base for Juno (at least no word about it is documented here)!
I much appreciate the quality of VS Code. But I am also much concerned about how the efforts of Microsoft to enter the open source licensed product market are fitting into its long-term business plan. Which extensions will become placed behind a pay wall once the user base is strong and strongly hooked, and competitors will meanwhile be rare?
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It seems you can install vscode extensions in “Theia” (Using VS Code extensions in Eclipse Theia) so anyone can just use that editor if they feel like it?
Feels a bit like unwarranted fearmongering to me. Just like Julia, VSCode (and many (most?) of the extensions) are MIT licensed.
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That’s not entirely true though. The code in the github VSCode repo is MIT, but the VSCode product that we download from Microsoft is licensed under a proprietary, non-free EULA. And some high-profile extensions, most notably the remote-wsl extension and a few others from microsoft, require the official VSCode so in principle you can’t use them if you build VSCode from source. Even the extension marketplace itself has this kind of restriction, which is why there’s an alternative (https://open-vsx.org/). VSCode is a great product, and I don’t think MS will actually put their extensions behind a paywall, but they aren’t exactly championing the open source spirit either.
This really doesn’t seem like something to worry about, considering that the Julia VSCode extension works just fine with both Theia (at least I think it did) and VSCodium.
We’ll also get the extesnion on open-vsx.org at some point in the hopefully near future.
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You right about the license of the binaries of VSCode, but you can check VS Codium, that it is a binary version of the source code of VSCode, and without that non-free EULA. About the extensions, I had not idea about limitations of several extensions.
EDIT: @pfitzseb has been faster than me mentioning VSCodium.
Yep I’m aware. It’s just that VSCodium not able to use the extension marketplace due to the restrictive license of microsoft that’s quite bothersome.
what extensions cannot be used?
Rather the entire official extension marketplace. I believe VSCodium recently changed to openvsx (not sure whether it’s been reflected in their releases yet) due to exactly this. Regarding extensions, the microsoft C/C++ and C# extensions and the remote-wsl extension are among the ones with restrictive licenses that forbid usage in non-officially-licensed products.
Of course you can still privately configure your VSCodium to use these; MS won’t knock on your door and sue you so there won’t be much real-world consequence. It’s just that these restrictive licenses doesn’t send a very friendly message.
They make arguably the best text editor / IDE, releases it for free with a permissive license, developes a huge number of extremely useful extensions (best remote editing ever) and you complain about “not sending a friendly message”…? I mean, jeez, some people are hard to please, heh.
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Of course, they’ve done phenomenal work for the open source community and pretty much everyone who writes code; I’m not denying that and I love that I can use all these tools for free that make my life so much better and I am thankful for that. But on the other hand people do care about and discuss this kind of issue, since FOSS is more than just about doing good work. I don’t know, maybe I’m being unreasonable, but everyone has their opinions.
…Emacs cough cough…
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It is about long-term trust, not about any doubts concerning the high quality of the product. The current generosity could be the future retention. Big company, big money, big economists, big lawyers, big money, big company - it is a business circle and there is a business plan behind all generosity.
I found only two reasons for a company like Microsoft to be active in the open source market: they need (1) to hook developers to their products in order to produce revenue from the developers purchasing Microsoft products, and they need (2) developers to produce the code which requires to run in their big data centers in order to make revenue from selling access to their big data center computing performance. I actually assume the business interest follows both options: influence the main development workflow to depend more and more on the cloud and then sell the cloud access to the developers, and keep the developers who are producing code potentially aiming at High Performance Computing, Julia programmers for instance, happy enough to diligently produce (almost free of costs!) the products which well-funded HPC customers then purchase by renting expensive access to the HPC center where this code is running.
It was mentioned above, that it seems you can install vscode extensions in “Theia”, and “Theia” could thus quickly serve as an alternative base for Juno. There might be other alternatives around which maybe did not become mentioned? No, not vim or emacs, I am speaking about an IDE which can soon also be used for data exploration, not only coding. I consider a good IDE, good for coding and good for data exploration, both together good for very efficient prototyping, to be one of the more important strategical arguments when selecting a programming environment. So, why taking a strategical decision for this future IDE, for Juno, without seriously also considering the FLOSS options which could provide a long-term legal and budget certainty for the Juno project and many Julia users?
As I am not able (at least not by now) to contribute to Juno myself, I at least wanted to take the chance to support the proposal of v-i-s-h, while decisions are of course taken by the acting developers.
Last but not least, thanks not only for the currently available high quality VS Code and Julia extensions, but also to the great Juno team for all their efforts supporting us with their IDE, whatever base they finally consider to serve themselves and the community best!
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Large companies are also jumping on the open source bandwagon to cut costs. It isn’t always nefarious and about capturing and trapping users or exploiting them. They shunned open source for a long long time until more recent open source projects and communities, including GitHub, made it too obvious to ignore the benefits of that development approach (as opposed to doing everything behind closed doors).
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