Episode 28: Using Pylance to Write Better Python Inside of Visual Studio Code

The Real Python Podcast

Sep 25, 2020 50m

A big decision a developer has to make is what tool to use to write code? Would you like an editor that understands Python, and is there to help with suggestions, definitions, and analysis of your code? For many developers, its the free tool, Visual Studio Code. This week on the show, we have Savannah Ostrowski, program manager for the Python Language Server and Python in Visual Studio. We discuss Pylance, a new language server with fast, feature-rich language support for Python in VS Code.

Savannah explains what a language server is and the types of features it can provide. This includes type information, code completion, automatic-imports, dead code analysis, code navigation, and more. We also have a discussion about type checking in Python, which led to how Pylance leverages the static type checking tool Pyright, and what are type stubs (.pyi files).

Course Spotlight: Python Type Checking

In this course, you’ll look at Python type checking. Traditionally, types have been handled by the Python interpreter in a flexible but implicit way. Recent versions of Python allow you to specify explicit type hints that can be used by different tools to help you develop your code more efficiently.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:47 – Current Role at Microsoft
00:03:01 – Background with Python
00:04:21 – Origins of Pylance
00:06:53 – What is a language server?
00:09:56 – Diving deeper into the features individually
00:14:42 – Code navigation and diagnostics
00:15:43 – Methods of defining types and stub files
00:17:28 – What are examples of stub files?
00:21:16 – Comparing Pyright to Mypy
00:23:56 – Video Course Spotlight
00:25:02 – Auto-imports are a contentious feature
00:28:36 – Code actions and dead code analysis
00:31:46 – Pylance working with Jupyter notebooks in VSCode
00:33:30 – Multiple workspaces
00:36:16 – Why do you like to work on developer tools?
00:39:35 – How does a tool like Pylance help a beginner?
00:42:31 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
00:46:25 – What do you want to learn next?
00:49:24 – Thanks and goodbyes

Show Links:

Level Up Your Python Skills With These Courses:

Python Type Checking

Python IDEs and Code Editors: The Complete Guide

Finding the Perfect Python Code Editor

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