Python application launcher (for Python code)

[Deborah Swanson]

breamoreboy at gmail.com wrote, on February 25, 2017 4:49 AM
> 
> On Friday, February 24, 2017 at 1:54:39 AM UTC, Deborah Swanson wrote:
> > Michael Torrie wrote, on February 23, 2017 7:43 AM
> > > 
> > > On 2017-02-22 09:49 PM, Deborah Swanson wrote:
> > > > Didn't even look. Visual Studio has always been pricey, and it 
> > > > never
> > 
> > > > occurred to me that they might have a free or cheap version now.
> > > 
> > > You can get the full edition of Visual Studio, called 
> Visual Studio
> > > Community Edition for free.  They still offer Visual 
> Studio Express,
> > but
> > > I think they recommend the full community edition to most people 
> > > now.
> > > The biggest downside to the VS Community Edition is that it has to
> > phone
> > > home and log in to MS's developer web site from time to 
> time to stay
> > > active.  Sigh. MS almost gets it, but not quite.
> > 
> > Another free version of Visual Studio, wonders never cease!
> > 
> > As for it phoning home, I won't use it for long, and then I 
> might not 
> > ever use it again. Wonder what value they think this has, 
> other than 
> > giving them a nosecount of how many active copies there are at any 
> > given time.
> 
> As an alternative to Visual Studio Community Edition, which 
> takes forever and a day to download and install, you might 
> like to give Visual Studio Code a try https://code.visualstudio.com/
> 
> Kindest regards.
> 
> Mark Lawrence.

Thanks Mark, I will take a look at it.  It sounds like a real pain to
keep on top of all the invasions from Microsoft and who knows else, but
likely that's all set up in Visual Studio Community's .NET installation
code. I don't/won't have any .NET after about version 3 on my computers,
so it just occurs that I may not even be able/willing to install it.
Later versions of dotNet not only phone home, but can also serve as a
backdoor to the NSA and other government nasties. That's one reason why
they're all so keen on killing XP, because anything before SP3 can't be
instrumented in that way, and a major reason why I'm sticking with XP
SP2 until I can get back on Linux. And on top of that, now you say
Visual Studio Community Edition takes a long time to download and
install, even if you're willing to live with all that comes with it (I'm
not).

I almost have a verifiably working version in Python of the funcionality
I want from that C library, so I may just bag Visual Studio. It would be
nice to see what calculations they're exactly doing in that C library
because the authors are authorities in this area, but the body of
calculations is all written up in other sources. Once I have a Python
version I can verify against another dataset I have and it checks with
the written sources, I may not care whether I have that C library to
compare to or not.

But if I really want to see all the execution steps in the C code, going
with Visual Studio Code is probably the way to go.  Heck, I thought it
would be a shortcut to download the open source C code and model my code
after it, but it's turned into a rats nest of trouble, which likely
won't tell me anything I don't already know at this point.

Deborah