They've invested a ton into Python support in VSCode in recent years. It's really good.

The language server Microsoft built for type checking and completion (https://github.com/microsoft/pyright) is excellent. It makes Python feel like a first-class statically typed language, which isn't something I was able to replicate in Pycharm (tried this very recently). Meanwhile, it's just baked into VSCode, no configuration needed.

I use Jetbrains tools for several languages, but for Python and frontend (Typescript with React/Vue/Angular) VSCode is hitting the perfect notes.

I haven't touched Python in years, and just recently came back to it. I was very pleasantly surprised to see just how much Microsoft has improved the tooling in VSCode with the recent update (https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/05/11/vscode-...). I've only tinkered with it a bit, but it feels on par with the JS/TS experience in VSCode, which is surprising since those are native and have a more robust static types community.

C++ will not save you any trouble over python. It’s tooling and package management is significantly more complex.

My experience is also that PyCharm is much more pleasureable to work with and on a safer side. I checked 1.5 year ago, so could be changed, for remote development on a server and had to download some 3rd party Rsync tools to be able to do so. For PyCharm is just works out of the box with a professional license.

VS Code experience has definitely improved a LOT in the past 1.5 years with the new python language server (pylance) and remote development being improved quite a bot. We use it daily in production in my company with almost zero problems so far.

Indeed, anything but VSCode:

"What data is collected. The GitHub Copilot collects activity from the user's Visual Studio Code editor, tied to a timestamp, and metadata."

PyCharm, Emacs, Vim, are all better and don't spy.

PyCharm has similarly bad privacy: https://www.jetbrains.com/legal/docs/privacy/privacy.html. I'm really happy though that I learned to use Emacs, really useful and language independent.

I came here to read this.