For application programmers, the workspace is not a place to sit with a screen, a keyboard, a chair, but rather is an integrated development environment within which code can be created, shared, compiled, and managed either inside the tool itself or through plug-in extensions that link it to other tools. IDEs have been around for decades and are not anything new. What is new is how suddenly popular one particular IDE – VS Code – has become.
For the past several years, nearly three quarters of the programmers in the world polled for the Stack Overflow Developer Survey say that they use VS Code, the tool let loose as open source by Microsoft a decade ago as a glorified code editor that has gradually evolved into a true IDE and spread like wildfire across the Windows, Linux MacOS platforms. VS Code can be used to create programs written in C, C#, C++, Fortran, Go, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, Rust, and Julia on those platforms and, more recently, has been extended to work with the IBM i platform and its RPG, Java, and SQL applications.