Mozilla x (Perl + Python) = New IDE 173
WhyteRabbyt
writes: "ActiveState have announced
Komodo, an open-source IDE for Perl, Python and Javascript. The
application framework is to be based on Mozilla. The press release is here."
tenchiken contributed a bit more
information about the project, writing: "More information is here
, including the announcement a few days ago that they would be writing
python and perl bindings to XPCOM. Like Perl? How 'bout client side perl!" No, it's not out yet -- but it's cool to see Mozilla as the engine behind yet another project.
Re:IDE (Score:1)
Granted, Visual Studio may not be the best tool to learn C++, for example. But it would be a major pain in the ass to write a decent windoze app with notepad.
Of course, there is a compromise between a lightweight text editor and an IDE -- its called Emacs. Never leave home without it.
Re:Who's side are they on? (Score:1)
Money__, I think they're on your side.
Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:5)
I'm not surprised that Komodo uses parts of Mozilla this way. It's an obvious and practical job that Mozilla is well suited for.
In the next six months, I would be stunned if more programs don't use parts of Mozilla in exactly the way that Komodo does -- both in public and for private projects -- from custom document archiving, information kiosks, and no doubt in the 'Internet Appliances' we're seeing more and more of.
I don't expect that most of these new programs will be anything like web browsers. Mozilla -- as the mother of all monster widget sets -- is well suited to to be part of just about any program.
Mozilla has the ability to turn into a pervasive toolkit, as pervasive as Perl but even more visible to the user.
I pointed this out to a Mac user once, and they responded flatly "Well, I like IE".
Not getting the point, I said "Well, you could use IE as your browser, but parts of Mozilla will show up in more programs...it's the basis of many other programs."
Mac user: Blink. Blink. Silence.
On a different note, the only thing that concerns me with Mozilla are security problems with XML, though I'd expect XML engines to have problems once people push it a bit more. The security problems that I'm not aware of, similar to the ability to get postscript printers to do odd things -- like serve up web pages.
Re:xpCOM (Score:1)
Re:Client side Python in Mozilla would be a Nirvan (Score:1)
The truth is, that they have to do client-side scripting to make this really useful, because building an application in Mozilla basically depends on the client-side scripting functionality.
MS was driven to support multiple scripting engines in IE3 because 1) they HAD to support Javascript (and still do) because everyone uses it and 2) they wanted to provide an MS-owned alternative, VBScript, that they could try to push people to use and get locked into.
Re:IDE (Score:2)
It doesn't, of course. But the problem there is not the concept of the IDE.
What you are missing is the ease with which a good IDE will do much of that stuff. Visual C++ will tell you the parameter info of a function in a tooltip if you just position the mouse over it. It will put the same tooltip info up as you type parameters. Without any user interaction. It will give you a list of member functions to selection from if you type in a class instance and the '.' or '->'. Again, without any user interaction.
Yes, you can get the same information with VIM. But you can't get it as easily, or as transparently.
No, IDEs aren't perfect. But on (for example) a C/C++ project under Windows, IDEs clearly beat any editor I've ever found.
sortof offtopic: Looking for new Editor (Score:1)
The features i like are the auto tab placement. You hit tab and it places your bracket or line in the proper position in line. The 'expression parenthesis highlighting'. You place your cursor on a left or right token and it will light up the whole expression in red if there are no matching right or left tokens or green if there is a matching one.
Can someone please help, i guess i should tell you i am running linux, so that eliminates windows software (obviously).
cristiana
Re:how dare you! (Score:1)
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:1)
Don't make me do Windows. And until they get Photoshop & Director running smoothly on Linux (and make it easy for the dozen or so production artists on my team to use every day) then I stay where I'm at.
Re:IDE (Score:2)
Re:IDE (Score:1)
This objection to IDEs is a popular one, and there's some truth to it: how many C++ developers recoil at the thought of poorly done, MsgBox-laden code thrown together by some guy who just bought himself a copy of Visual Basic and thinks he's a programmer now? I think this image leads us to condemn IDEs as whole. But really, IDEs are not the problem. The problem is that, no matter how simple the tool, programming problems still require some complexity of thought that no RAD tool can replace. The developer's mind still has to figure out what needs to be done and then figure out how to do it, and that's seldom a trivial task.
For some tasks, IDEs make life simpler. For others, they just get in the way of productivity. In both cases, it's more a question of "What's the right tool for this particular job?"
As it stands IDE's do not provide a software DESIGN tool, and therefore are a restraint to how well a piece of software ends up being produced.
Here I agree with you. In many cases, people use some flashy IDE to build a mock-up, which quickly gets turned into the real thing before anyone has had time to think about really making the program useful. But I haven't seen a CLI text editor that's a good software design tool, either. My favorite software design tool is an 8.5x11" (or A4 in a pinch) piece of paper and an erasable pen. To each his own.
IDE's make it too easy to lameify coding to the point where it has no plan, except the final product, which is not enough.
I agree that this is an area of IDEs that needs to improve: they still generate horrendous code! I try to find ones that make "less horrendous code," or at least what my opinion of less horrendous code is.
I'd be interested to see the results of that study--post 'em on /. when you're done!
unDees
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:1)
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:1)
Wouldn't know - I don't have windoze and I don't use IE. As far as I'm concerned Mozilla doesn't have XUL either. All it has is a profile manager that ignores all input, which I could hack up in 5 minutes, and a 400MB codebase that hasn't compiled in weeks.
Re:IDE (Score:1)
Good things IDEs brought us:
- Syntax Highlighting!
- Statement completion, expanding arguments to calls as you type (dereffing against all include files, giving a list of structure/class members (basically ctrl+space in m$ words)
- Integrated debugger: Without that many starting programmers might still think printf() is the only way of debugging anything.
- Context sensitive online help
- Source control for the masses
Bad things IDEs brought us: Wizards. These hurt skills. (Imagine a visual studio adapt trying to set-up a motif application using only vi and gcc...)Re:sortof offtopic: Looking for new Editor (Score:1)
The only downside is that it's not available for Windows and I've become spoiled for all other editors.
-DA
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:1)
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:2)
Mozilla could begin a bad trend. Where we have configure all our apps for consistancy.
"Yeah and an even more informed Mac user would actually spend some time making the native UI for Mozilla, instead of sniveling about how it's not supported. Unfortunately, Mac users just want things done for them, and have no initiative to better an application for their own fucking operating system."
Haven't you been paying attention? Computers aren't toys. They are *for* lazy people. Real men write letters by hand and calculate spreadsheets with abacuses. Lazy people use their computer for these things.
If Mac people want things done for them, heck I, a Gnu/Linux user, want things done for me. Like a cron daemon to run scripts and for my logs to be rotated. I also want my apps to be consistant without me getting off my butt to do it. I don't want to write XML by hand to code such a thing. And then have it be slightly but noticable off.
I like GNOME. Because it changes themes of *all* gtk apps. When I install Mozilla, it will change themes of all gtk apps *but* Mozilla. That isn't so bad in the GNU/Linux world, because we are used to that. But on the Maacintosh, they already have consistancy. Why would they want to give that up for some dissident they don't need? I certainly won't.
Perhaps someone on the Mac platform will embed the rendering component into a native Mac app like they will being doing with GNOME and (I think) KDE. That is the optimal solution IMHO.
So yeah, I *am* lazy. That's one of the reason I use GNU/Linux. So I can have my tasks done for me.
Re:Client side perl? Got it (Score:1)
netscape.net:netscape.com::hotmail.com:microsof
i.e. it's a webmail service. He's not speaking as a Netscape employee just as a hotmail.com address dosn't speak for Microsoft.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
"Real Soon Now" Options (Score:4)
As someone who has fielded around 100,000 lines of Perl, among the many "Real Soon Now" options for cross-platform web software development, I side with the strategy exemplified by Tibet [technicalpursuit.com] 's approach to cross-browser compatiblity.
The difficulty of writing an application that will run on a variety of web browsers is already a primary challenge of software development. Adding more languages to the mix will only make things worse. Adding the relatively static Java to the dynamic Self-like [sunlabs.com] Javascript was one of the biggest mistakes in the short history of the web (one for which Steve Jobs must accept a lot of the blame, but that is another story). By biasing toward installed language multiplicity rather than downloaded compatability-layer consistency, Komodo is in danger of becoming another, albiet lesser, mistake. IE isn't going to relinquish its dominance for a long time to come, not even with the US Federal Goverment fighting it.
IMNSHO, on the strength of environments like Tibet, demand for programmers of Javascript will beat Java "real soon now" [ideosphere.com].
Watch this site [lmarkets.com] for developments.
Re:Client side Perl? (Score:1)
Re:IDE (Score:1)
Although a plain ol' text editor *may* be better for learning a language as you mentioned, once you're familiar with it a good IDE can really speed up development, and cut down on a number of plain old stupid errors as you're coding. This is especially true if versioning and checkin/checkout type tools are built in.
Besides, IMHO there are some things which are *much* nicer in an IDE than at the CLI, such as debugging (especially things like UI debugging).
But hey, to each their own, go with what works best for you!
X-ACTO
Re:Client side perl? Got it (Score:1)
Re:Client-side Perl? (Score:1)
And all will be revealed. Well, that's not true. Some will be revealed. More later.
Client side Python in Mozilla would be a Nirvana (Score:1)
Add to this the fact that Mozilla is going to run on everything from Linux to Mac to Windows to Name your favorite OS and its easy to see how much easier our lives are going to be when coding crossplatform apps.
On security, the Moz team will either make a sandbox or nobody is going to use Mozilla so I'm pretty sure they will think things out with great care.
(Posted using the latest nightly of Mozilla)
Re:IDE (Score:1)
You should invest in learning vim, emacs, jed, or some other programming friendly editor.
Re:Ethics of Perl Implementations (Score:1)
Are you getting the hint of who's to blame here?
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:1)
You could help too if you weren't so busy wallowing in your own crapulence.
Ah the irony! (Score:1)
Re:And here's how to make it happen (Score:2)
But those and a lot more tools together *form* an IDE, which you have right in front of you already if you have those tools installed.
Link to O'Reilly's piece on this IDE (Score:1)
O'Reilly, which has a partnership with ActiveState, has a very interesting piece [oreilly.com] up about this IDE.
The O'Reilly has some details not found in the other two links, especially concerning the features and protocols supported in the IDE.
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:1)
I prefer the open source model myself, but if you need a custom browser in 5 minutes using VB/IE components is a good way to go.
Re:IDE (Score:2)
I could go on, but I think I've made my point, namely that whatever you need, Emacs either does it or can be made to do it.
Re:Client side perl? Got it (Score:1)
I didn't mean to imply that I thought he worked for Netscape. I just figured he was firmly ensconced in the Netscape camp. Good catch, though; I'm glad that's clarified.
Also check out this RAD GUI IDE for Python. (Score:2)
Re:Sticky breakpoints, & less typing (Score:2)
As part of my job I had to port a large program to NT, so I decided to give VisualStudio a go, after all, I like IDEs very much (I do prefer the X+sawmill+Emacs+make+bash+... IDE, but the others were nice at the time too). I was fairly surprised that they actually had regexp search in, but the joy ended the second I needed to pipe input from one search into another, or just search all files matching a specific pattern... There are no pipes in the GUI unfortunately.
I agree that you don't want to do repetitive typing yourself if it can be avoided. If you could click a button (or preferably, as you already have your hands on the keyboard, just press a specific key) to perform some operation, that is as a starting poing a ``good thing''. This is actually what Emacs tries to do, and that's why you use C-s and C-r for searching, and "C-c C-v i" (longer sequence for less frequently required function) for inserting new files in version control. I don't agree that Emacs is entirely nice here, I just haven't found a better editor for code yet (yes, I use vi for config files and kernel code, but besides that it's emacs all the way).
However (!) If I did find a better editor, it would plug right into my existing framework of window manager, bash, grep, gazillions of other tools. You can't hot-plug the editor in VS.
Anyway, I did really try, believe me, I'm an open minded person, but Visual Studio is in my oppinion a *very* poor substutitute for a *the*real* IDE, for someone who knows various IDEs generally and *the*real* IDE specifically.
I don't know about sticky breakpoints, I rarely debug code (that way). I'd be surprised if GUD didn't supply such a feature (GUD is actually a little fun because while being the Grand Unified Debugger, in Danish it is also the word for God, so, I found God when searching for a debugger
The point about repetitive work I think needs another angle of view. Yes, we want to avoid it, and *no* you definitely do not want to type the same stuff over and over again in a shell.
Now, to rename the define F1OO to BAR1, F200 to BAR2 in all
find . -name '*.[chf]' | xargs perl -pie 's/F(\d)OO/BAR$1/'
AND THAT IS IT ! If your IDE doesn't have a button that says ``replace text matching some pattern with another pattern, in all files matching some pattern'', then *you* will have to do your repetitive work clicking buttons whil I have moved on to the next problem a long while ago.
Sure, you need to grasp regular expressions. But if you want to get real work done in any environment (now that even VS is catching on), you might as well do that anyway. And then you need to grasp pipes. Well, start by thinking of it as, say, a pipe.
Not meaning to be sarchastical (if I could only spell that), but I think most of the arguments in this discussion are based on people seeing the problem from some very narrow viewpoint. I may well be doing the same, but for now I'm convinced that I'm not, and looking forward to being proved wrong.
Re:+ GCC????? That would _kick_ass_ (Score:2)
MS and ActiveState doing the same with Windows (Score:2)
Re:IDE (Score:2)
I like IDEs because they are a labour-saving device. How many ppl here use a machine to wash your clothes? (no, Mum does not count
Yes, there is the argument that hand crafted beats machine tooled, especially in software, but I don't want to spend time updating or fixing builds and headers when I don't have to.
It's called COM, it;s around for ages (Score:1)
I don't get why an end-user is involved in the equation: the end user just fires up a program to work with. He/she couldn't care less how that program will perform it's work, just that the work is DONE.
Btw: IE is a com object for years. It comes with several interfaces really, so you can just bind to the object and create your own editor with it within a few lines of code. (Homesite does that for example).
The funny thing you mention is 'DOS world'. that world is dead for ages, pal. Also: the world isn't about colliding zillion tiny programs on a command line with pipes, but dynamic loading and linking to binary libs, loading and linking to binary objects. THAT's the real deal. And unix is still far far away from that.
--
Client side Perl? (Score:2)
Before you flame me, let me state that I am a certified idiot.
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:2)
A slightly more educated Mac user might have commented on how the Mozilla widgets look like 'Winblows', and there was no way in hell that he was going to touch any Mozilla-based application until it started to look and act like a Mac app.
And, if they were a little more informed they'd know they'd know about chrome!
Re:IDE (Score:1)
Dave
Re:why perl? (Score:1)
Re:Single platform (Score:1)
I agree that cross-broswer and cross-platform compatibility (at least in elegantly degraded modes) is crucial to a successful public Internet publication/application. But, don't forget there are occasions to use Internet technologies in the context of a controlled envirnoment. Think of an extended Intranet. On an Intranet, usually within an organization, the tools can be dictated: to use this Intranet you must use XXXX Browser on XXXX OS.
For a distributed internation organization, using a APN over the Internet enables cheap networking. Add web browser applications in place of legacy charater-mode application and you have a robust, cheap client-server architecture to deploy corporate applications. On such a system, the employer can dictate the OS and browser to be used.
It is such a dual-setting that I'm working in. We have a publically accessible web application (browser/OS nuetral) and a VPN-deployed application for an extended Intranet (on which we specify IE 5.01 and Windows 98).
So, I don't know about bulls, but maybe this explains is why human males have those "useless" things...
Re:IDE (Score:1)
There needs to be a cool, easy to use IDE for Python (and similar languages) that lets novice programmers do interesting things and learn how to program. We had BASIC. You typed stuff, it did it. You could make games, and do graphics. There needs to be an environment like that for budding programmers. This project looks like it might deliver.
Re:IDE (Score:1)
Many IDE's aren't even configurable enough to even allow the setting of complicated keybindings. Trying to force a non-modal editor to behave modal like vi would be a huge pain. There's also a lot more I like about my editor than keybindings. Trying to emulate my favorite editor in some other editor will always be a game of catch-up (much like GUI skins that try to emulate the native look and feel).
This sounds like an interesting point, could you explain a little further. Do you mean Delphi-like coordinates on forms vs. Java Swing layout components?
Yes, essentially. Java isn't unique in supporting layout management though. There are numerous problems with not using layout managers. The fact that most GUI builders don't let you use a layout manager makes them useless for real applications.
Again, this isn't a problem that has to exist. It's possible to make a GUI builder that supports layout management. Most of the existing GUI builders don't though. And the fact that most IDE's are closed (ie: don't let you pick and choose your components) means that you've got to find an IDE that not only has a proper GUI builder, but also has an editor you like, works on all of the platforms you support, supports all of the languages you use, and can deal with a huge number of source files. Combine that with the fact that each developer has their own favorite editor, and you've got a serious problem.
Re:IDE (hysterical laughter) (Score:1)
>Programming is more than
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You must work for a software design house, or engineering firm, and probably not a particularly profitable one.
Here's a few cars for your clue train:
1) If it works now, and it needs to work now, it doesn't matter if it's elegant. How many $$$ (or lives, in some industries) need to be wasted while you plan your properly designed code? As far as your management is concerned, the process as a whole needs to work, and don't bother us with your intellectual pipe dreams.
2) The guy who can come in and hack the bug out of existence before the company haemorraghes its entire cashflow is the guy who gets the bonus. The guys writing the bonus checks don't read the code, so it doesn't matter how well designed it is as long as it gets the job done.
3) No program that is truly useful in the wired economy lives by itself. It is dependent on opsystem, web server, the users, the programs that feed its inputs and outputs. If you want the best possible program, you need to be intimately familiar with the internals of all the related programs - which is hardly practical. You're going to have to settle for what works, in the so-called "real world".
4) Saying that IDEs should not be used because they make it easy to produce bad code is like saying that the Internet should not be used because it lets morons post bad pr0n (wait, maybe that's true
5) Companies buy lots of stuff, and they hire people to make it interoperate. The stuff is capital expenditure that can be amortized, depreciated, etc. The people are a monthly drain on the company coffers - operating budget - and thus it's cheaper for a corporation to run bad code on awesome hardware than good code on crappy hardware. Why do you think NT is still selling? Why do you think W2K is selling? Pretend you are the smiling man for a moment and look at the economics of it.
Only free, open source software can save us from this situation - software that is written and/or improved from non-commercial motives. We're still at least 5 years away from an OSS world, though.
I don't use IDEs because I work on too many platforms simultaneously for an IDE to be useful to me - but if I had an IDE that could make code simultaneously for the mac, VMS, OS/390, Solaris, Linux, Win98, and WinNt you better believe I'd use it - even though the output from such an IDE would probably be suboptimal on most if not all of those platforms.
>Don't piss me off about this, I'm planning a huge research study on it..
"Be still my beating heart."
--Charlie
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:1)
As for other projects in beta, well, they at least work equally well or poorly on different platforms. Mozilla is so nonportable that it won't even build on most of the platforms I use. And there are a lot of different meanings for "beta." For example, GIMP 1.1 is beta. I've used versions from 1.1.6 through 1.1.20 and I can say that not one has failed to compile for me, and not one has so thoroughly failed to function. Repeatable crashes that give you a nice backtrace versus a monstrosity of random failures each of which requires half a gig of memory and 12 hours just to find. It wouldn't even be so bad if I could get past their damn profile manager. But all it does is hang. No crash, no dump, no error messages. Just a hang. If it did that on every platform, it would have been fixed. But it's on sparc-sun-linux, which won't earn AOL a dime and they know it. So nobody cares.
I'll stick to lynx. It works, and best of all it actually fits in memory. If it breaks, I can probably fix it too. Amazing how much easier it is when there's no bloat.
Re:IDE (Score:1)
I've already said I have nothing against IDE's per se. It's just that none of the existing ones meet my requirements. Multi-platform and multi-lnguage support are some of my requirements.
What you are missing is the ease with which a good IDE will do much of that stuff. Visual C++ will tell you the parameter info of a function in a tooltip if you just position the mouse over it. It will put the same tooltip info up as you type parameters. Without any user interaction. It will give you a list of member functions to selection from if you type in a class instance and the '.' or '->'. Again, without any user interaction.
Yes, you can get the same information with VIM. But you can't get it as easily, or as transparently.
This isn't a feature that requires an IDE. It could be implemented just as well in a stand-alone text editor. And while VIM doesn't support this particular feature, it does support loads of other features that Visual C++'s editor doesn't support. And what if I work with Java, or Python, or some other programming language? What if I need to look up a UNIX-specific function's signature? Will any of these features work? I don't do much Win32-specific C++ programming, so I fear most of VC++'s features will be of little use to me.
And the non-editting features of Visual C++ (project management, build management) simply won't work with my project, a minor feature like tooltips aren't particularly compelling, especially since I can use ctags to practically the same result, albeit in a slightly less "transparent" way... ^]yy^Tp
Re:xpCOM (Score:1)
A bit of history first: Netscape developed xpCOM recently, as a componentisation protocol. It is a ripoff of MS COM, with a few names changed and is incompatible with MS COM. Netscape did this just to annoy Microsoft.
Now, linux users are all catching on to componentisation, which has been around for years --- apparently only because it doesn't have MS's name on it now.
There has been an awful lot of COM development done, and there will soon be an awful lot of CORBA and xpCOM.
Somebody should sit down and try and reconcile the three, so that we can have components which are portable everywhere and connectable everywhere - instead of only with that sector of the programming world that used the same componentisation protocol.
Re:IDE (Score:1)
Oh, and there's also the minor fact - mainly for consultants - that different companies use different IDEs, and it is harder to transition out of an IDE one has learned than from command line tools. In fact, if one insists on using command line tools, one can usually get away with it no matter what environment or language one winds up working with, thus avoiding tool relearning (which cuts into personal productivity, and thus into how fast one can get raises).
As for debugging, printing checkpoint acknowledgements onto the command line or, where there is a GUI, into some reserved box on the GUI tends to work better than IDE checks - especially where one has to compile the code for use on a customer's machine and debug it on the customer's machine, in those cases where the customer's environment activated the bug.
GUI editors have another problem you did not mention. Even if one wishes to use coordinates, rather than geometry/layout, I can usually get better coordinates by measuring the coordinates and typing them in than by trying to match mouse coordinates exactly. For a number of the GUIs I have worked on, it turns out there is a mathematical model for the coordinates of widget placement. The model depends on the GUI, but the important thing is that it is there, and once it is deduced, it can be used to determine the coordinates of new widgets without having to place them and see them first. (It's still a good practice to review them visually once they're in place, if only to make sure the model doesn't need tweaking. But if the coordinates are correct, then nothing further needs to be done: what the reviewers are seeing *is* the actual GUI in implementation, not a rough sketch that then needs to be coded and compared with the model...which makes implementing GUIs significantly faster.)
Re:IDE (Score:1)
When you are learning C, you will get by fine with a single file or a small number of files, so you can just type "make programname" and not even need a makefile. Either that, or "gcc -o program file1.c file2.c file3.c", etc.
It's only when you want to use advanced compiler features or have large projects that the makefile comes into its own --- and by that time you should be a fair programmer anyway.
My POV on the IDE is that it is a great thing; some people choose to learn an IDE rather than concentrate on the language, but surely that is their choice. One might compare it to learning GCC extensions instead of ANSI C.
And whatever anybody might say, an IDE is *faster* for performing all these operations (finding a variable declaration, addings files to a project, editing multiple files, etc.) Even if its only a fraction of a second, it is immensely annoying if you are not able to change a line of code, whack F9, see the changes, then do the same again, all in a matter of seconds.
One point which I am surprised I have not seen mentioned, is integrated debugging. That is one of the greatest strengths of VC++ and BCB. Being able to step through a program, in the same place that you were coding it, and have watches available and having tooltip variable evaluations, being able to execute an expression you enter and then have the program continue, being able to modify the source and keep stepping through it, and so on.
Weeding out bugs in an integrated debugger is speedy and fun.
The only problem I have with the IDEs I've used is their lack of support for vi-style editing. Now, if it would let you specify a commandline to use as an editor within the IDE - perfect!
Re:Programming is not just what you write (Score:1)
Re:IDE (Score:1)
Re:IDE (Score:1)
1. Emacs does syntax highlighting and auto-indent. I don't know what you mean by 'intellisense'. Auto-completion isn't that useful to me. I see it as a lazy man's way of not learning the damn function/variable names well enough. If you're working on a large project, you should at least be making an effort to grok the parts of the program you're working on.
Intellisense is the ability for the IDE to detect the methods signatures and object signatures and automatically display them to you in tooltips and dropboxes. You're definitely a beginner, I can'rt believe anyone wuld say that something that aids a programmer's workload as a lazy man's solution.
When you start working on large projects, you can't even remember functions that you write yourself, having the editor give you hints so you dont' have to go back to the documentation is quite useful (and being able to just to the definition of the function with a simple mouse click over the function name is useful too).
We're all humans, and it's SMART to know about out limitations when implementing systems. We for example, can only remember 7-8 things in our shortterm memory.
gdb is very bad when you compare it to VC++'s inplace source editor/debugger. Hover your mouse over a variable name and you get what it holds, edit the source code and continue debugging immediately without having to restart the whole program (edit-and-continue) etc....gdb is like stone knives in comparison.
Enjoy switching from xterm to xterm, recompiling and recompiling with every debug manually.
enjoy gdb. Just don't tell your boss how much time you're wasting.
Re:IDE (Score:1)
I can't think of a single way it is more powerful - can you? More flexible? Configurable? You get to choose your editor....but that's it More efficient? A seasoned IDE programmer would be at least as efficient as a seasoned commandline programmer, no?
But for people still learning a language, and needing to look up documentation occasionally (and perform other misc tasks), an IDE may be a better choice.
Are there any serious programmers who do not need to look up documentation occasionally ????
This brings me to another point: most of the open source code I have looked at is hideous, ugly, undocumented (or with useless comments), and parts that haven't been worked on by seasoned coders are also rather inefficient.
Not a good example for someone learning C to look at -- and probably, that's why the situation isn't getting any better. I don't want to work on anyone else's open source project because I would spend most of my time figuring out someone else's code and rewriting it properly. This includes figuring out what I should expect from someone else's functions.
Re:KDevelop (Score:1)
And with vim, you can even bind ^C to copy ('y') and ^V to paste ('p' or 'P') if it makes you feel more at home (after pressing 'v' or 'V' and selecting the text you want).
I prefer vim because you have the added advantage of having 26 copy buffers, rather than one -- and having append as well as overwrite. So I can go through a file (or several files), copying pieces of text as I go, and then paste the lot somewhere when I am done. Or I can copy several seperate pieces, and then re-paste them in any order.
If you want to use the mouse for highlighting, run vim in a window on your windows machine, and use windows highlight and paste.
Smart environments are only smart when up-to-date (Score:2)
Personally, I like the ease of use of Visual Studio
I used to like Visual Studio too. I work in the suit-based Microsoft world, so it's the best editor I have any reasonable hope of getting on-site.
The downside of "smart" environments is when they get out of date. If the "intelligence" it knows about HTML turns out to no longer be true, then it becomes counter-productive. As an example, I no longer write HTML, but always XHTML [w3.org]. The InterDev HTML editor fights you all the way with that ! It doesn't understand closing the tag on an empty element, and it doesn't know about quoting attributes. If you insert an without the size, then when you next look at the source InterDev will have gone in there and mangled it, "helpfully" putting width and height attributes onto it. Unfortunately:
<img src="foo.jpg" / WIDTH=120 HEIGHT=240>
isn't even valid HTML (the / that ought to stay at the end), let alone XHTML.
Re:IDE (Score:1)
Blaming poor design on IDEs is ludicrous. I can write a badly designed project just as well in vi as i can in an IDE.
Failure to use an IDE simply does not suddenly make one's program better designed. In fact, in my experience, it makes it even worse.
I find design easier in an IDE because I can see all of my files at once, and rapidly ensure that each piece is in the right file, and see which pieces of which file call other files, and so on.
Now that I have learned (through long experience) how to design projects properly, I can and do do it just as well in an IDE as without an IDE.
Your study may well find that the best-designed projects are written with a text editor in UNIX. However, this will not imply that the use of a text editor caused it. A more likely explanation would be that most of those who have good design skills are the sharp-minded ones who are at home on a Unix box.
Re:IDE (Score:1)
Although I've nothing against IDE's, I personally prefer a plain text-editor and the command-line compiler tools. I just wonder who else is like me and dislikes IDE's.
I'm willing to bet money that you have not done any professional programming, or have not done so for very long.
Uh huh. A plain text-editor? Right, so you don't think having syntax highlighting, autoindenting, intellisense, autocomplete etc are useful?
And as for command line compiler tools, what do you use for debugging? gdb? Lets say you have a 20K line multithreaded program, how long do you think it'll take you to debug that with gdb?
One reason I stay away from IDE's is because it somewhat locks you into a certain interface that you get accustomed to when programming in that language (or environment, whatever). I find it more useful to learn how to use the bare-bones text-editor / CLI interface first, to focus on learning the language itself rather than the IDE's interface.
Well you are contradicting yourself there. First you talk about getting locked into an interface, then you talk about needing to know a language first. So what is it? I don't see how an IDE will somehow change the language, perhaps VC++ lets you type in BASIC?
What IDEs do is make people unaware of some command line tools available (traditionally unix tools) like make, cc/gcc etc.
But these are hardly anything to do with the language, they're just some tools for the language - useful to know, but not essential. You can learn make in an hour or two anyway.
After I learned the language, then I find my learning more easily applied to any development environment -- IDE or otherwise.
Yes, but it wouldn't matter whether you learned the language in an IDE or in vi, except that with an IDE you don't have to worry about how to compile, how to debug. With IDEs like VC++ learners of C can do step by step wakl through of code and see variables change, and they can also manually change the code and continue debugging. It helps learning the language and programming in general a lot.
If I had started out with the IDE, I find myself lost when placed in a situation where only command-line tools are available, and need to spend a lot of time learning the "real thing".
Again you're confusing the language with basic tools. VC++ is just as valid a tool as gcc and make are.
It's so much better to learn it the hard way first, then your skills are more marketable/adaptable.
So what you're saying is that you are still learning it the hard way?
Well trust me, when you get a bit more experienced, you'll find that the novelty of doing it the hardway is no longer the best way (cause you've had your fun and learnt all the tricks).
Many modern software engineering companies are starting to use graphical UML tools like Rational Rose for essentially drawing classes that are then turned into code automatically.
Prorgamming is about what you write, not how you do it. The interest comes in the algorithms and the creation itself. And the easier you can do it the better - you can spend more time concentrating on what you're doing not how you do it.
ok?
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:3)
I'm not surprised.
One of the advantages of open source development is that, if you have enough projects going, you have a tremendous potential for reuse of code. Another is that since APIs and file formats are genuinely open standards, modules become more consistent and encapsulated. Still another consequence of using open standards is that 'embrace and extend' becomes very difficult, if not impossible. Adding new features is easy, but it is tough to lock your users into your product line.
Result: (ok this isn't anything new for us, but I'm getting to my point) UNIX-- where you have a million highly optimized tiny programs that do one thing well (and are reused everywhere by everything) instead of a few monolithic packages that barely interact with one another.
OK, nothing new so far. Here's the point: this is old hat to us, but a brand new concept to the end-user world! The whole idea that you could use parts of one application in another is just foreign to them. In the DOS/Mac world, features come from individual blocks of code. In the open source world, features are derived from the links between those blocks. If you didn't grow up with it, it is a totally new way to think about computing.
Another result- development of brand new applications will be faster, too, since good code gains value with every re-use with minimal development, rather than having to be reimplemented.
Say someone wants to create a WYSIWYG word processor, or a page layout program. Or some totally new application concept. Well, hey, let's just use pieces of Mozilla. And the program is in alpha release a few months later. I suspect that it will take years for the full significance of the concept to hit people.
Re:IDE (Score:2)
That's a pretty inflamatory remark. I'm not a college student, and I've been progrmming for over 15 years, yet I tend to agree with the original poster. At every company I've worked at, almost no-one used IDE's because most state of the art IDE's suck. Virtully all existing IDE's are a crappy note-pad like editor with a "compile" button, a cheesy GUI builder, and a lame excuse for project management.
If the question is "Do you consider an IDE useful?", the answer is definitely yes. All it takes is trying to manage a project with 20 - 50 files each with a 1000 or more lines of code to quickly turn one against bare bones editors and towards IDEs.
Explain how increasing the number of files makes an IDE more useful? The project management features of most IDEs are a joke. The project I'm working on has over 6000 source files. We don't use an IDE. We use a revision control system for managing our files, and tools like ctags and cscope for finding things. How would an IDE help us? Oh, and did I mention that our source files are in at least 6 different languages?
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against IDE's per se. It's just that every IDE I've ever seen has had a bunch of annoying problems. They tend to be difficult or impossible to extend, they don't let you use your favorite editor, they're not cross-platform, and they're usually tied to a particular language. The vast vajority of GUI editors also suck big time, because almost all of them use coordinate placement of components (instead of proper geometry/layout management).
An IDE is a tool. But trying to build real software with today's IDE's is like trying to build a house with tools like these [etoys.com]. If a better IDE comes along, I might start using it. But today I'll stick with bash and VIM as my development environment.
Re:About Komodo (Score:2)
___
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:2)
Play nice. Not all Mac users are newbies.
I didn't mean to imply they were. This one was fairly experienced -- but not a tech -- so I was a bit surprised about thier dead-pan answer. In fact, I'll be quite happy to take any spare Mac hardware -- PPC+ -- you might have!
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:2)
Mozilla is not limited to being a UI or part of an IDE...or a web browser. The ability to hook it up for your own uses is what makes it valuable.
If your tasks change, you might see value in using Mozilla. I've not found it to be bloated, but it's not built to be a single-function widget...so I don't need to see it work like one. Stripping out the parts that aren't needed -- and that will happen -- will make it a bit peppier. The only question is what parts aren't needed? It's limited to the task at hand.
Re:Client-side Perl? (Score:2)
Safe TCL [scriptics.com] was actually discussed as a possible extension language for e-mail, with prototypes done in Metamail.
A lot of people have talked about Java's "sandbox" security as being pretty feeble. A language designed from the start to be "Safe" may be able to provide more powerful constructs with fewer vulnerabilities.
Re:IDE (Score:4)
Personally, I like the ease of use of Visual Studio (note Visual Studio - *not* Visual Basic).
Basically, let's say you want to add a function to a class. Well, right click the class' name, click "Add Function" and all you have to do is type in the return type and name of the function (and its privacy class if you like). Done. It even adds the correct include statement to the header file if, say, an argument in your function is the type of a class that isn't defined in your scope.
I like that. I also like the fact that, while typing, Visual Studio will display a tooltip that highlights the arguments of a function, so I know exactly how many arguments there are, of which type, and even overloaded functions are handled fine.
I most definitely like the debugger. It's *MUCH* better than:
gdb stuff
break
run
* break hit
next
list
next
and crap like that.
People say that it's not real programming. Well guess what, IDEs are tools. They help you get the job done. Dijkstra's algorithm doesn't change whether you're using an IDE or not. IDEs, in my opinion, are glorified text editors (expensive ones too...) which do the grunt work for you.
I love my IDE, and until *nix has something like it, I seriously doubt I'll be doing heavy development for the platforms.
Re:Who's side are they on? (Score:3)
ActiveState also apparently benefit from MS knowledge, specifically at the time producing a version of fork() which would work on Perl for Win32.
I've used the Win32 version of ActivePerl extensively. It's a GOOD product, more than making up for the lack of decent command scripting tools in base NT. The only real deficiency at the time was the lack of multiprocessing or thread support, which the latest version (with fork()) has recently implemented.
You can get Python, Zope, Java for Windows. Free. Perl for Win32 has been around for a while, ActiveState just took it to a new level of professionalism. Even Apache has a Windows offering, which is an excellent and far less clunky replacement for PWS.
Some of us need to use Win32 at work. Some of us, shock horror, may even like some aspects of it.
I can't see ActiveState coercing Unix Perl users to go over to the enemy. Rather I think it may help give Win32 programmers an insight into Unix-based tools and maybe get them to check out this Linux stuff.
Zealotry and anti_MS paranoia does get really boring at times. Guilt-tripping AS because they don't share your paranoia about MS is in my opinion a sign of immaturity.
Re:Client side Python in Mozilla would be a Nirvan (Score:2)
Thanks for the tip; the official press release was far from clear on this point. :-)
I wish them luck. I guess one complicating factor here, though, might be the fact that there is a lot of DOM stuff in particular where the Javascript interface is essentially the de facto one (even if the W3C admits the possibility of other scripting language bindings). Which will make this all very interesting come upgrade time...
Re:IDE (Score:2)
TUIPeer [bmsi.com] is a text-mode look-and-feel for the Java AWT. Would it be possible to do the same thing for Mozilla? If that happened then Mozilla and all apps based on its widget set would be runnable over telnet or in an xterm. It might give the Lynx users something to worry about :-)
The beauty.. (Score:2)
And thus is the beauty of open source!
Certainly, you can use IE5 to develop full apps, but compared to the fully-documented, full-source-code mozilla, designing for IE5 becomes inordinately difficult and expensive, relitively speaking. The hooks to NS6 are both in modular format (real re-use, not just re-use the renderer like IE5) and through the XUL engine (who's your gatekeeper?) which makes the platform very accessable. I really want to see this IDE in action too! I would love a perl ide, as I wasted a lot of resources on my concentric site because I called a sub-shell, and it bonked me on the head for 256 user seconds each time! It would be nice to profile things before they go into production. Then again, I should have read the vde manual online at cnchost.com, but I didn't. This project would likely have saved me a lot of time!
client side perl? (Score:2)
perlplus i think it's called.
Re:Client side Python in Mozilla would be a Nirvan (Score:2)
the dumbing-down of programming (Score:2)
The dumbing-down of programming [salon.com].
--
Re:IDE (Score:2)
Certainly easier than trying to figure out which of the forty instances of the symbol you just grepped for is the definition. Especially if the code was written by an #ifdef crazy programmer.
RHIDE: free IDE for GCC (Score:2)
IDEs, in my opinion, are glorified text editors (expensive ones too...) which do the grunt work for you. I love my IDE, and until *nix has something like it, I seriously doubt I'll be doing heavy development for the platforms.
RHIDE is a free IDE by Robert Hoehne and Salvador Eduardo Tropea. It runs on DOS and Linux and looks just like Borland's old DOS IDE. It's a very good editor with project management and a frontend to GCC.
But are simple makefiles really that hard?
Re:IDE (Score:2)
And here's how to make it happen (Score:2)
we can set up emacs to call make when we press F9
There should be plenty of opportunity to come up with new small utilities and improvements to the window managers, to the build tools, to the editors, and to things we haven't even thought of yet.
If Emacs is to become an IDE, someone should write an interactive graphical editor for .emacs preference files. Newbies often have very serious problems setting them up. Need an example to steal? Look at Mac OS 10 to see how easy Eunuchs system administration can get.
You can't do "Intellisense" in EMACS (Score:2)
At least, I've never seen it.
It is the single most useful feature I've used in an IDE - it speeds up typing and stops you having to look for documentation on the exact method names.
I use the Borland eqivalent feature in Delphi, and I can't live without it. Now, even when I'm typing in a work processor I find myself typing for any word longer than about four letters.
Breakpoints and intergrated debugging are wonderful things, too, but like you said, EMACS does them fine.
IDE (Score:4)
OK, this is perhaps slightly off-topic... but I'm just curious, what percentage of slashdotters actually find an IDE useful?
Although I've nothing against IDE's, I personally prefer a plain text-editor and the command-line compiler tools. I just wonder who else is like me and dislikes IDE's. :-)
One reason I stay away from IDE's is because it somewhat locks you into a certain interface that you get accustomed to when programming in that language (or environment, whatever). I find it more useful to learn how to use the bare-bones text-editor / CLI interface first, to focus on learning the language itself rather than the IDE's interface. After I learned the language, then I find my learning more easily applied to any development environment -- IDE or otherwise. If I had started out with the IDE, I find myself lost when placed in a situation where only command-line tools are available, and need to spend a lot of time learning the "real thing". It's so much better to learn it the hard way first, then your skills are more marketable/adaptable.
---
About Komodo (Score:3)
___
Re:Client side Perl? (Score:2)
Client-side Perl? (Score:4)
Re:IDE (Score:2)
Re:IDE (Score:2)
I'm no big fan of the current notepad-with-a-compile-button species of IDEs, but this is, I think the biggest weakness of plain-old-text programming.
Re:Client side Perl? (Score:2)
The Poll Mastah answers in the form of a Poll:
What should you answer when someone asks you about Perl security?
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:2)
Sorry, but Chrome is a poor excuse for native UI widgets. Even if you can match the look - not always possible - the behavior is usually pretty shoddy.
I don't get that you're "sorry".
Instead I hear "Bitch, bitch, bitch". Do you have access to the source or not? What complaints do you have now? Are you doing anything to change things, or is it all complaints?
Re:IDE (Score:2)
From my personal expeirnce, most IDE that I have used (on any platform) kinda blow. Every IDE I have used up to this point REQUIRED you to use the mouse. Which is really annonying if you right in middle of a peice of code.
With [insert_favorite_text_edit] (mine is vi) you bang out a couple keystrokes and you can quickly do about anything from compling it, to running it, etc, etc without leaving the keyboard.
It has became like second nature or a habit
esc:w:!./program_name
when writting and debugging perl scripts, takes 1 second, 2 at most. Most IDE (haven't used many for perl) take 2-10 mouse clicks to compile and run the program, takes 5 to 20 seconds at most.
Personally I just find IDE uncomfortable compared to vi, virtual consoles and bash
Hell most of the type I have a virual console open with bash or tcsh as the shell and to say compile or run the program I could just switch to the console and press the up key and enter and get a full screen output, not one of those tiny little windows
Ctrl+Alt+F2 [up] [enter]
Just habit I guess
Plus awhere I am at, the development envoirment doesn't change, wheather it be Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc. etc they all got vi and the say GNU goodies everyone has come to love (Perl, GCC, Python)
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:2)
Yeah and an even more informed Mac user would actually spend some time making the native UI for Mozilla, instead of sniveling about how it's not supported.
---
Yep, imagine that. Someone who doesn't want to code every app he or she uses. Believe it or not, some of us have a Real Job (involving coding, ironically) or a life outside computing that we'd like to see once in a while.
Sorry, but not everyone lives in your little world. For some of us, coding a UI around a browser isn't an option. But do you, as a coder (although I'm not really convinced you are one) really prefer to code without any input from your userbase? If so, I'd hate to see the quality of any software you've written...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Re:IDE (Score:2)
But there is a hell of a lot an ide will do for you beyond a compile button. Visual C++ will automatically find where a variable is defined. it will allow me to add files to a project with a mouse click instead of a makefile edit. It will tell me what modules call the symbol I've highlited. It will show me the header comment attached to the function call I've highlited. That's just a few things. IDEs can be incredibly useful if you know how to use them.
Penguin Sandbox/Signing system (Score:4)
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:2)
And, if they were a little more informed they'd know they'd know about chrome!
---
...and the most informed of all will sneer derisively at the concept as chrome can never perfectly replicate the intricacies of an operating system's native widgets (look or feel), and as soon as the user decides to use a system-wide theming program such as Kaleidoscope [kaleidoscope.net] (or the built in MacOS theming system [macthemes.org]) Mozilla looks awfully out of place.
Sorry, but Chrome is a poor excuse for native UI widgets. Even if you can match the look - not always possible - the behavior is usually pretty shoddy.
(And it's going to be even worse when MacOS X [apple.com] hits...)
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Never thought i'd see this (Score:3)
cristiana
Re:Client side Python in Mozilla would be a Nirvan (Score:2)
I've heard about the JavaScript-specificness before. So help me, this has to be the silliest limitation in the whole Mozilla project. I mean, it's not as if they didn't bother abstracting away from the {user interface, rendering engine, networking code, fill-in-the-blank}. But Ecmascript was holy? It's a bit depressing when Microsoft, who probably had every reason to push VBscript as hard as possible, actually offer more choices for client-side scripting (by a lot) than Netscape/Mozilla/anything else.
That said, it will be pretty awesome to write XPCom stuff in the language of your choice. And the ActiveState people have a pretty good record for providing what they say they will.
Re:IDE (Score:2)
I've not yet seen an IDE as scriptable as bash.
I've never seen an editor that lets you accomplish programming-related tasks than vi, although emacs is close and I admire many of its features.
I must admit, however, I am currently being swayed down the dark path of some of the nicer GUI debuggers out there...
Client side perl? Got it (Score:5)
Yep. That's right. Client-side perl using Internet Explorer. Since 1997.
Templets. (Score:4)
What do I mean by Templets ? A typical commercial Office suite comes with literally hundreds of half finished documents and a Typical Commercial IDE has a pile of half finished programs.
Just start up the app, respond to a few questions for general things and you have a working app that may do part or even all of what you want ( if you have simple needs ). A really cool interface is nice and good online docs are extremely helpful but the REAL killer feature is the document files included in the distribution.
What I suggest is that the OSS IDEs designed for beginners ( This, GIDE and KDEvelop come to mind ) should have a well documented and simple method for creating wizards and templets. Then novices should be invited to work on these with the core developers only providing QA and guidance ( You don't want the IRC wizard to generate a client that must be setuid=root do you ?
Same goes for the Office suites, except that we should bundle a ton of clipart. Sure it means that latter on when you install Mandrake or Debian ( Both already 2 CDs each ) you have a 3rd CD called "templets and clipart" with nothing but royalty free graphics and sound plus BSD licensed sample source code. The apps will then know how to find it ( don't hardcode
BTW : Did anyone else notice that what separates the downloadeble WordPerfect 8 for Linux and the WP8 Office for Windows ( Motherboard driver disk version ) from the Shrink-wrapped full price versions is just the printed manuals, Templets, clipart and founts ?
Re:Mozilla in 2001; "It's everywhere everywhere!" (Score:2)
I don't get that you're "sorry".
---
Really?
---
Instead I hear "Bitch, bitch, bitch". Do you have access to the source or not? What complaints do you have now?
---
It's called 'feedback'. On occasion, some developers are known to be responsive to it, rather than telling their userbase to fuck off or to code it themselves.
This isn't some obscure command line utility, this is Mozilla/Netscape which - I assume - is meant to be used extensively outside of the development community that created it. Since many developers can't develop user interfaces for shit (and the better ones will admit it), I'd hope that they'd be more receptive than you.
---
Are you doing anything to change things, or is it all complaints?
---
Guess what? Good companies spend a lot of time soliciting feedback from the public. The above statement makes the dubious assumption that my 'complaints' (for lack of a better term) aren't an attempt to 'change things'. I disagree, and hope that you're not as rude to your own userbase.
...Anyhow, would you rather respond to my actual points re: Mozilla's user interface, or are you going to attack me personally instead?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
IDEs for OOP (Score:3)
But with Java and C++, the advantages of an IDE become huge. Class browsers and Intellisense (also called autocompletion) actually make it intuitive to work with hundreds or thousands of different classes at one time. So sue me if I can't remember the order of the parameters that go into some obscure method on a class I hardly ever use. Intellisense makes that a total non-issue.
Also, many people who tried IDEs years ago, but haven't looked at the newest crop, should really take another shot. I mean, GUI-builders have become vastly more sophisticated in the past years, and wizards have grown from relatively-useless little aids to incredibly poerful tools. Think about how many programming tasks are really "boilerplate". Getting rid of repetitive tasks is NOT dumbing-down of programming. Really, it's just the opposite. Programmers should only have to spend their time THINKING. Not writing stupid makefiles. Not re-typing simple code that hundreds of other people have already written. And we certainly shouldn't have to spend our time switching back and forth between DDD, emacs, and cscope.
Re:IDE (Score:3)
You contradict yourself by asking two contradictory questions. If the question is "Do you consider an IDE useful?", the answer is definitely yes. All it takes is trying to manage a project with 20 - 50 files each with a 1000 or more lines of code to quickly turn one against bare bones editors and towards IDEs. Now if you are asking which is better to learn a language with then the answer definitely should be a bare bones editor so that certain quirks of the IDE do not seep into one's programming style. Novice programmers are fond of using IDEs as a crutch and more than once I've seen kids crash and burn when removed from the Visual Studio world and transplanted into a Unix environment. I hope this answers your question. Of course questions like yours ignore the fact that a programming language is merely a tool used to perform a task and not a religion or esoteric art to be mastered in all its minutae. Frankly anything that makes you more productive gets an A in my book.
Now so as not to be marked offtopic by some anal retentive moderator here are my comments about the article, clientside perl will be welcome addition to the scripting arena, it is really cool that Mozilla's original plan to be more than a browser and instead to be an engine/building block component similar to MSFTs COM components is working. Go Mozilla!!!