William Ricker wrote: > Asking everyone who's used any perl ide to share could be a > stone-soup meeting sometime.
A brief one, I imagine. :-) > A good programmer's editor that can colorize syntax and autoindent > and hop to matching or enclosing braces is half the battle. Most of > us who "don't use ides" have that. True, and that used to be all we expected from editors, but those features make up a decreasing slice of what's desired. Theoretically, a really good IDE needs to be intimately familiar with a language. It should understand the syntax well enough so that you can do refactoring things like renaming variables without renaming methods or subroutines using the same name; it should know that @foo and $foo[0] are the same variable; etc. (And supposedly the difficulty in groking Perl syntax is one of the reasons why it took so long to see Perl IDEs.) Documentation for anything should be one click away. While documentation for everything Perl related is generally good and readily available, it inevitably requires a "context switch" away from what you are doing. Over to the command line to run 'perldoc -f function' or to CPAN to look up documentation on a module. Or worse, needing to look up the syntax of a Perl operator where you have to waste time paging through perlop. I haven't looked at Komodo in years, but I'm sure they've addressed the above issues. What I'm less sure of is how the capabilities of Komodo when working with Perl compares to something like Eclipse working with Java. (There's a Perl plug-in for Eclipse, but I'm sure it doesn't provide near the capability as you get from Eclipse when working with Java.) Makes me wonder if we convince ourselves that we don't need IDEs simply because we don't really have a choice in the matter. (Even ActiveState doesn't pay much attention to Perl these days. And the point Martin Owens makes about IDEs being slow is valid. Eclipse is certainly not known for its speed. But with quad-code desktops starting to appear, I think that'll be less of an issue.) > But so many of my scripts wind up being run via SSH... A lot of the development I do is remotely via ssh, so colored syntax highlighting is often a luxury. > A graphical debugger front end *is* nice. I used O'Reilly's original > one (pre Komodo), it really helped on certain issues. O'Reilly or do you mean ActiveState? I vaguely remember using a one of the early releases of ActiveState's Perl Development Kit (PDK) for Windows that had a GUI debugger. I didn't do enough development on Windows to stick with it, and stopped upgrading after a few releases. But yes, a GUI debugger is quite important. It's not that it is necessary, but ideally you want to encourage developers to use the debugger by making it as simple and painless to use as possible. It's particularly valuable to new programmers to a language, so if anything, it should lean towards a more simplified interface and leave the advanced stuff to the console debugger. -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
