My Favorite Microstuff

I’ve used Visual Studio Code for more almost two years now. I was always pleased with its Python support, but using a TypeScript has really brought me over to being a proponent of Microstuff.

Microsoft has a long history of undermining open source; and some of the history has made itself felt in their platform offerings. Internet Explorer rather famously tried to wall off the internet. Backtracking on that was a long and difficult process for Microsoft, their users and internet web application authors. C#, while not really harmful to open source, was and is an innovative language with powerful productivity features; but credible support for the major Unix-alikes — Mac and Linux — was long in coming (and perhaps still arriving, if we allow that .NET Core is but one of a few pieces of the puzzle). It could be said that open source lost out, not for technical reasons or even business reasons, but merely for policy reasons.

Just the same, Microsoft’s commitment to 1st class technical research and tools development has netted some odd gains over the years, gains which are being shared. Microsoft has long been a supporter of work involving type systems. Anyone who’s used Haskell (raises hand) in the past ten years has benefitted from their support for GHC. TypeScript, while by no means research, definitely has the flavor of cutting edge to it — bringing some of the best ideas from typed OO to bear on a platform that’s notable for difficult scoping rules and a troublesome approach to comparison. And where would I be without Visual Studio Code, with its excellent Vim mode, modest power usage, and mostly working IDE features for many languages? Every other IDE I tried on my 12 inch MacBook crashed it.