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Perl Programming

ActiveState Discontinues VisualPerl/Python 240

Posted by CmdrTaco from the somebody-somewhere-freaks-out dept.
Noiser writes "ActiveState discontinues VisualPerl and VisualPython for Windows. Demand doesn't justify further development, they say. No, they don't mean to open-source these products, due to licensing problems with the inseparable MS Visual Studio integration code. Back to vi/Notepad/Komodo, then..."
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ActiveState Discontinues VisualPerl/Python More

ActiveState Discontinues VisualPerl/Python

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  • They what? Oh.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gbulmash ( 688770 ) * <semi_famous@ya h o o .com> on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:24PM (#14267990) Homepage Journal
    For a second there, I thought they were discontinuing ActivePerl and almost got angry. I don't use it a lot, but it's nice to have it for Windows when I do. Then I realized that these are their Microsoft Visual Studio IDE plugins for the two languages and breathed a sigh of relief.

    Personally, it's understandable that there wasn't enough demand to keep the products viable. Any Perl hacker I know either does their coding in a text editor or a different IDE than MS Visual Studio, since most of them are Linux/BSD buffs and only have Windows for gaming or to be able to run a specific Windows program for a client.

    It's worth noting that they'll, upon customer request, replace each license for the Visual products with an equivalent license for their own Komodo IDE at no charge. And while they can't open source the ActivePerl products for VS2002 or VS2003, it looks like they're going to make them available for free. So if you feel no need to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005, you now have a new goodie as consolation.

  • Welcome To Hell (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:27PM (#14268017)
    Visual Studio??? + Perl???

    Isn't that what bad software engineers are forced to use for eternity in Hell?

    Yeeeechhh!!!

    • Re:Welcome To Hell (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Saxophonist ( 937341 )
      I did try out the ActivePerl/VS.Net 2003 combo. I was not particularly impressed. I was hoping for more integration with the IDE somehow; instead, it felt like I was just using a text editor to write perl code, which kind of defeats the purpose. It's been a while since I tried it, so I don't recall more specifically what was lacking.
    • No, that would be Cobol. Except for the 9th level, where you're forced to use ML.
      • Except for the 9th level, where you're forced to use ML.

        Which, oddly enough, is exactly what the Visual Studio team is developing next, in the form of F#.

        In fairness, real ML and its cousin ocaml are absolute dreams to develop in. Great libraries, great compilers (the ocaml native compiler regularly produces faster executables than a C compiler), and no development environments to speak of (though emacs has a great inferior caml mode).

        • "Which, oddly enough, is exactly what the Visual Studio team is developing next, in the form of F#..."

          So... if the circle of fifths naming convention holds true, the next iteration after that will be called 'B'.

          Oh wait...

    • Re:Welcome To Hell (Score:5, Funny)

      by temojen ( 678985 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:41PM (#14268133) Journal
      Visual Studio + lisp.

      • Re:Welcome To Hell (Score:5, Funny)

        by castlec ( 546341 ) <castlec.yahoo@com> on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:28PM (#14268467)
        spell it correctly!!!
        it's lithp :o)
      • (((((Visual Studio)))) (+) (((((((((((((((lisp))))))))))))))

        • sigh

          OK, you parenthesis-phobes, tell me what's so much better about:

          f(g(x->y));

          as opposed to

          (f (g (get 'y x)))

          ?

          I absolutely love developing in Lisp and I don't understand why the notation bugs so many people. 3 function calls in C = 3 sets of parentheses. 3 function calls in Lisp = 3 sets of parentheses. The only difference is that operators in Lisp are functions, but on the other hand blocks after control structures don't require braces, since you alread have the parentheses.

          Just a pet peeve of

          • OK, you parenthesis-phobes, tell me what's so much better about:

            f(g(x->y));

            as opposed to

            (f (g (get 'y x)))

            ?

            f(g(foo)) is notation that people are used to from mathematics. (f (g foo)) is equivalent, yes, but it's not intuitive for many people. And x->y is in the order that people are used to from many other fields: A:setup is setup from A:. slashdot.org/~geoffreyerffoeg/journal is journal from geoffreyerffoeg from slashdot.org. The latter would
            • But if you're going to deviate from what people know already, use RPN

              Yeah, I love Forth and Joy. The only problem with RPN is you then have fixed arity of functions (well, Forth allows currying but only by passing execution tokens, so not *really*). Standard Polish notation works great because you have defined precedence and there's no need to have fixed arity.

              • What's wrong with parenthesis-optional RPN? Every time you hit a left parentheses, you spawn a new subinterpreter. Every time you hit a right parentheses, you close the current subinterpreter and store the stack as a list object taking up one space on the stack.

                ( 1 2 1 2 + ) ( 3 4 2 / 1 ) * ( 0 1 1 ) dot would be treated as {1,2,3} {3,2,1} * {0,1,1} dot, which would become {3,4,3} {0,1,1} dot; then the dot product is 7.

                If you don't like that, just let the top of the stack be the arity. 1 2 3 4 3 multiplus w

          • Re:Welcome To Hell (Score:3, Interesting)

            by timeOday ( 582209 )
            OK, you parenthesis-phobes, tell me what's so much better about: f(g(x->y)); as opposed to (f (g (get 'y x)))
            Lame example, try this one instead:
            (-b+sqrt(b^2-4*a*c))/(2*a)
            • Lame example, try this one instead:
              (-b+sqrt(b^2-4*a*c))/(2*a)

              OK,

              (/ (- (sqrt (- (* b b)
              (* 4 a c)))
              b)
              (* 2 a))
              *shrug* I guess it's more parenthetic (but also more legible), but you'd probably use a macro to write that anyways.

              And doesnt x^2 mean x bitwised XOR'd with 2?

              • And doesnt x^2 mean x bitwised XOR'd with 2?
                I wrote it in matlab / octave :)
          • Just curious: how many good mathematicians use the Lisp style notation to work with their equations?

            I know there's at least one who likes Lisp and has used it for info theory stuff.

            But if the Lisp notation is so good wouldn't it be better for mathematicians? Or is there a reason why it doesn't work well in that environment?
        • Shouldn't that be:
          (+ (Visual Studio) (lisp))
      • Oh dear god, lisp... Lots of Irritating Silly Parenthesis.... I did some with it, and my professor was obsessed with lisp. He also thinks Object Orienting is a fad.... A friend once asked him a question about lisp, and I guess he got a half hour long answer. I couldn't help but laugh every time he said cdr (pronounced cooder (like cooter))....
  • I'm really grateful for their Active* language distributions, but it honestly never occurred to me to look for a Visual Studio plugin to write them with. Did anyone really use them? I mean, the article would have you believe that they weren't used, but I'd be interested to hear some real-world stories.

    Besides as long as there's Emacs for Windows, I can't imagine wanting to use anything else for Unix-origin languages.

    • Besides as long as there's Emacs for Windows, I can't imagine wanting to use anything else for Unix-origin languages.

      Maybe for shell scripting, but for software/web development, I couldn't imagine life without a good IDE.

      Don't get me wrong. I could hand-code everything in notepad if I so desired. I make sure to never become so dependent on the IDE that I lose the ability to think for myself.

      But IDEs are just tools that make development so much quicker. They list all project files for easy opening

      • Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        They allow for compilation without having to write your own batch file.

        That's nice, but you really should be able to build your project with one step outside your IDE. Most Makefiles, ant build files, jam files, or god knows what else you use to build are 99% the same anyway. Make a single template and it might take you 15 seconds to customize it for projects that aren't too weird. As easy as starting a new project in VS.net, for sure.

        Intellisense saves me - easily - thousands of key-strokes per day.

        T

        • Intellisense in modern versions of Visual Studio vastly outstrip anything available for VI or emacs, at least for C++. Besides a vastly better and more intelligent engine than ctags, the ability to list & autocomplete as you're typing is a lot better than tab completion. If you supplement Intellisense with Visual Assist you've got the best code completion in the industry right now.

          I don't know if VS is neccesarily faster than VI/emacs when you consider all the customization and macros and practice th

        • Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          You mean I could type std::c"lists of namespace functions with c to chose from" with vi or emacs?

          Its nice with complex libraries. All the functions and objects are listed and the type of arguments for all. You can get work done very very fast.

          I wish I had this for linux or with perl or python to help write code faster and easier.
        • Anybody who would make generalizations like this while obviously not knowing anything about what life is like outside VS is a complete idiot. We don't get the pretty widgets, but most of the shit you think is so nifty about Visual Studio was available several years prior to people in the know.

          I'll tell you what, when I find someone that knows nothing about what life is like outside of VS, I'll let you know. I spent years writing C, C++, Java, Python, and even PHP/Html in emacs (no, I never decided to tak

      • Intellisense saves me - easily - thousands of key-strokes per day.

        Sorry, but I can't trust your opinion, because there's a fairly good chance that intellisense has rotted your mind [charlespetzold.com]

      • Maybe for shell scripting, but for software/web development, I couldn't imagine life without a good IDE.

        Um, I did mention Emacs. You didn't think we all used it because it was such a brilliant Notepad substitute, did you?

        In all seriousness, I've had pretty much all the functionality you mentioned for years, but for many more languages. Visual Studio wasn't the first widely popular IDE, you know.

      • Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode? (Score:5, Informative)

        by pthisis ( 27352 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:28PM (#14268468) Homepage Journal
        But IDEs are just tools that make development so much quicker. They list all project files for easy opening, and keep them organized.

        So do vim and emacs (in vim, all my recently opened projects are in the file menu, or I can open ~/src/projects in the file browser and pick one--it'll remember which files I had open in which windows the last time I was working on it, reset all my bookmarks, etc).

        They allow for compilation without having to write your own batch file.

        Compilation? We're talking perl/python here, right? I hit F11 to restart my web servers (and reread all the code), or select the client I want to restart from a menu in vim (we run seperate web servers for each of the clients we host, I just pick the one I'm want to switch to from the menu--F11 restarts the one I'm currently working on if I don't want to switch). Of course, since I'm working in an interpreted language I rarely need a restart anyway.

        But at any rate, clicking the "Make" button in my vim toolbar will build the current project when I do C/C++/Java dev work. You're right that I have to create a Make file, but you're going to have to do that anyway for any multiplatform project--and if I'm doing something like GUI design, my GUI builder creates the Makefile for me anyway.

        And when I hit make, if the compilation failed it'll jump me to the file/line where the first error was; I can fix it, go to the next error, etc from the toolbar (or keystrokes), then hit the make button again when I'm satisfied. As I jump around between errors, it shows the compiler's error messages in the status line.

        Intellisense saves me - easily - thousands of key-strokes per day. Being able to type two or three letters and hit tab or ctrl-space-tab to complete keywords or object names makes coding a line incredibly fast.

        Meta-/ in emacs or Ctrl-P/Ctrl-N in vim will do word completion, I don't know about emacs but in vim they'll limit it to currently applicable tags (so if I'm doing Java/C++ and I call object.foo then it'll only complete methods that start with foo and are methods of whatever class "object" is--or in C it'll only complete struct members, etc). I'd be shocked if emacs didn't do something similar.

        Vim 7 will also have OmniComplete (it's in the dev tree already) which is pretty much like Intellisense if the using a period and getting a dropdown (instead of just getting a tab-completion style listing of matches) is really that a big deal to you.

        Emacs and vim aren't wimpy text editors. Other things I can do:
        1. If I'm editing a python file, I get a nice dropdown menu showing the parent classes of the one I'm editing, the child classes, and all the methods. I can select them from the menu to jump to them.
        2. If I'm typing a call I get the method signature and beginning of help in my status line. So if, say, I type "cmp(" then the status line reads:
        cmp(x, y) Compare the two objects X and Y and return an integer according to the outcome. The return value is ne
        If I hit F1, I get the full help text.
        3. I can jump to tags easily, so if I see a call to "foo.blargle()" then I can click on "blargle" and it'll jump into the blargle method of class foo; I can keep drilling down through function calls, then hit back to pop back up the call stack to where I started.
        4. I can get diffs against other versions of source control, where it shows the 2 versions side by side with the changes highlighted (different colors for what was added, removed, or modified). And I can easily check files into/out of source control.
        5. I can do folding/outlining (so if I'm editing a file, I can toggle between seeing the whole file or seeing an outline of just the class/method definitions, then find what I'm looking for and expand back to seeing everything--it's far more powerful than that once you're used to it).

        Lots more, but those are a few highlights.
        • I feel like I am repeating myself ad nauseam - call it preaching if you will. But I think that any user of any IDE and certainly any developer of any IDE needs to look at Eclipse/Java. This is the state of the art.

          Surely, word completion better than nothing, but Eclipse has changed the whole way I write Java programs. Nothing out there like it for Python, unfortunately - the PyDev plugin only does some word completion and some very welcome but very basic error detection and that's it.

          Here is what I do with
          • I Open the calling chains for a method. That is, I see all code that calls my method and all code that calls these methods and so on. I get a whole inverse calling tree; takes about a second.

            This is standard code browsing stuff, cfront has done it for decades (literally). Any programming system that doesn't isn't even in the game.

            Find all usages of a variable. Or all write to operations. Or all read operations on a variable.

            Ditto, for the most part (barring weird metaprogramming/aspect oriented kung foo, e
          • That's a nice description of your Java development environment. But we all know that Eclipse excels for Java.

            How much of this stuff works for Perl and Python as well? (Remember, these are the topics of TFA.) When I looked at Eclipse at the start of this year, they didn't. Has this changed in the last 10 months?

        • I'm a Vim fan too, but I don't know how to tune many features you described! Can you please give some more info, or link, please? I'm mostly interested in project files and drop-down, showing parent classes.
    • Besides as long as there's Emacs for Windows, I can't imagine wanting to use anything else for Unix-origin languages.

      I love doing Perl in Emacs, but the job I started a couple of months ago doesn't have it installed, so I'm having to use vi. I'm actually starting to warm to it... which makes me feel like a heretic.

      I never even knew anyone supported Perl in Visual Studio and I'm not sure why they would. So now that it's gone, no big whoop.

  • Too Obscure (Score:4, Interesting)

    by justanyone ( 308934 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:30PM (#14268042) Homepage Journal

    I used to work at a large bank (JPMC) and we had project with two large parts: 40K lines of Perl and another 25K lines of visual C#. I looked into merging these lines into a single machine.

    My manager was ... nontechnical (throat-clearing-noise) and I had some discretion over the way this project went.

    I chose to not merge this stuff based on the fact that Visual Perl was a little too "out there" (unusual) and I knew I'd get looked at funny by the architecture review committee (you know, big corp == second guessing design decisions). So, I kept what we had.

  • Eclipse works fine (Score:5, Informative)

    by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:35PM (#14268088) Homepage Journal
    If you want plugins for a big heavy IDE for Perl and Python then Eclipse still works just fine. For Perl there's EPIC [sourceforge.net], and for Python there's PyDev [sourceforge.net]. Both are reasonably mature, quite featureful, and generally pleasant to work with.

    The only reason to be using vi/Notepad/whatever is if you are wanting to stay away from big heavy IDEs. That's not to say that isn't a perfectly sensible reason, just that the existence or not of VisualPerl and VisualPython really doesn't have a lot to do with it.

    Jedidiah.

    • Re:Eclipse works fine (Score:4, Interesting)

      by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:35PM (#14268518) Journal
      I tried to use EPIC, but I just couldn't get past the editor..it was just so lacking. Vim does everything I need in an editor, and a lot of what I need in an IDE, but its interface to it lacks. Sure you can hook perls debugger, set break points and watch conditions, have a window of all files in your project, your pod docs, your variable and function declarations with the ability to jump to where theyre defined, and pretty much any other ide feature you can think of.. but when vim still acts like a console app even when running gvim, then you just cant easily use most of them. I want resizable fonts per window, multiple floating windows, savable 'views'(one of the best parts of eclipse), and more detailed status than just a bottom line everything has to share.

      • Re:Eclipse works fine (Score:3, Informative)

        by pthisis ( 27352 )
        What is a savable "view" and does one of
        1. :mksession ~/test.vim
        (exit, restart vim) :so ~/test.vim

        2. Same, but replace mksession with mkview

        do what you want?
    • I think the point of the "Visual" IDEs is that you can (supposedly) do a lot of dragging and dropping and clicking instead of coding, for stuff like designing dialogs and setting up event handlers.

      Do these tools do that for Perl and Python?

    • The primary reason for using vi is the awesome editing power it gives you. You can do all kinds of complex edits, making the cursor jump around as you will it, without your hands leaving the keyboard. In fact, without your hands leaving the home row (no RSI-inducing ctrl-meta :-) ).

      This doesn't mean you shouldn't use IDEs; just that you should seek out an IDE with a good vi-mode :-)

      (I use emacs. The only command I've found that viper doesn't support is :q! (emacs still asks me to confirm). And emacs u

    • Am I the only person who _likes_ Komodo? My company purchased a copy for me when I started writing applications in perl, and I like it. Most especially I like the debugger, I never did learn the perl debugger. Even works well on websites. It probably saves me from trying to run at least 100 typos a day.

      • Am I the only person who _likes_ Komodo?

        Hm... I use Komodo for Python development and I ... hm, don't dislike it. Komodo's understanding of Python is good enough to have a working symbol finder, but the autocomplete is a bit lacking, but well - perhaps my expectations are a bit high for a dynamically typed language.

        The debugger is fine, although the classic python pdb is also fine. Well, I sometimes use the visual object browser in Komodo - gives me better insight into nested lists/tuples/dictionaries.

    • Semi-OT, but Eclipse also has a plugin to support Ruby development [sourceforge.net] and many other languages (overview [yoxos.com]).

  • <burns>Excellent..</burns> Who's next? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bADlOGIN ( 133391 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:36PM (#14268096) Homepage
    Seriously folks, this is good news. The more toolmakers who drop plug-in support for Microsoft's windows only junk in favor of cross-platform targeted tools, the better. It seeds a nice message about the future legitimacy (or lack thereof) of locking into Windows...

    • Re:Excellent.. Who's next? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @08:18PM (#14268749)
      The more toolmakers who drop plug-in support for Microsoft's windows only junk in favor of cross-platform targeted tools, the better.

      That depends entirely on your point of view.

      We write very portable C++ at work, but most of us use some version of Visual Studio as the IDE, because it's simply better than anything else available (even if it has been going backwards in several areas since they started going all .Netty, with the result that several of my colleagues have deliberately reverted to VC++ 6 from newer versions).

      We also use a lot of Perl scripts, for which having a decent editor is handy. Ironically, I was thinking just the other day that it might be worth buying VisualPerl for those of us who write and maintain the scripts. Now it sounds like they're going to give it away for free anyway, which would no doubt be very useful to us.

      So in our case, I have no problem with using software that only runs on a Microsoft platform. None of the stuff we write is Windows-only: both the C++ we develop and the scripts we use to support it run on many UNIX-based platforms as well. However, since I develop on a Windows box, using a Windows-based product, why would you want to stop me using something that fits in well with my development environment and helps me do my job?

      • We write very portable C++ at work, but most of us use some version of Visual Studio as the IDE, because it's simply better than anything else available (even if it has been going backwards in several areas since they started going all .Netty, with the result that several of my colleagues have deliberately reverted to VC++ 6 from newer versions).

        I guess you guys don't use much STL, since VC6 support for it is terrible. I have to ask though what exactly is wrong with the newer/est versions of VS? I've had
  • Back to vi/Notepad/Komodo, then..

    Uh, back to? Personally, I never left.
  • A quick question. Has anyone made a plugin for Eclipse to handle Perl or any of the other popular scripting languages?

  • Notepad++ (Score:5, Informative)

    by feebeling ( 145939 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:40PM (#14268126)
    ... or use notepad++ [sourceforge.net], which kicks ass.

    • Thanks for the tip. I've just installed it, and it looks very impressive so far. I was starting to wonder if the only way to get a decent syntax-highlighting text editor that could handle several common programming languages was to use Eclipse and about 5GB of plug-ins, and I'm very pleased to find that it's not! :o)

    • I've been using it for Python for a while -- I like it quite a lot, too, although I always wonder if there aren't even better Python editors out there I just don't know about. In particular, I miss the better auto-indentation of Emacs, and might try switching back someday.

      Are there other editors that can put comments in a different font? I love being able to write long comment lines, even though now anyone reading the code in some other editor is going to think I'm nuts.

      • Are there other editors that can put comments in a different font?

        UltraEdit lets you put comments in italics (as well as choice of color, etc-- all the usual syntax highlighting). Not sure if that is what you mean though. It is a text editor, so the actual font can't be controlled from within the file.

        Still, anyone who's thinking about checking out Notepad++ should think about taking a look at UltraEdit. It's got a nice set of tools and is reasonably extensible (macros and templates). I began using it

    • Notepad++ has no real documentation and I couldn't get a simple regexp search/replace job done with it.

      I downloaded a version of UltraEdit and my regexp worked out of the box. Ah well, I could have used Perl
      for that linewrap problem too (I had to mangle a large textfile into a format that could be pasted into Excel).
      Ah well.

      Usually I'm an NEdit guy.

  • No surprise there (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jodka ( 520060 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:03PM (#14268302)
    The lack of demand is unsurprising.
    1. Before you can use the plugin you have to buy MS Visual Studio, which costs $arm+leg.
    2. In competition is an abundance good Python IDEs for Windows, both free and the pay-for-it kind.

    Now, this is somewhat OT, but if they offered a Python plugin for Xcode on OS X, I would pay lots of real money for that. And Xcode is free, so the only cost to the user would be the cost of plugin. There is still no Python IDE on OS X which combines the following features.
    1. Integration with Interface Builder.
    2. A debugger.
    3. Aqua interface.

    Those seem like basic requirements for a professional Python development IDE on OS X but no such thing exists. The best available gives you two out of the three; Wing is nice, but runs in and Xterm on OS X with non-native widgets; dog-slow and but-ugly user interface. There is a nice optional package to support Python in Xcode, really cool, except it has no debugger.

    I use Objective C on OS X, it's ok, but would switch to Python in an instant if I had a Python IDE on OS X as good as is Xcode for Objective C.

       
    • Have you ever tried PyObjC [sourceforge.net]? XCode already has language files for python (IIRC), and PyObjC exposes the entire Cocoa/Carbon libs via an Objective C bridge.
      • > Have you ever tried PyObjC?

        Yes. That's WHY I want a good Python IDE for OS X.

        > XCode already has language files for python

        I know, I've tried it, it's excellenct, but has no python debugger!

        > PyObjC exposes the entire Cocoa/Carbon libs via an Objective C bridge.

        Yup, that's what it does. And if I had a good OS X Python IDE, that's how I'd being calling Cocoa and Carbon libs, from Python.

    • Does SPE run on OSX?? It is good....
    • ACtually, this article prompted me to have a look at ActiveState's Komodo. It's quite nice, on first blush: native Mac (not X or Jaca), good debugger. No integration with interface builder that I can see, yet... but might still be worth a look.
    • Before you can use the plugin you have to buy MS Visual Studio, which costs $arm+leg.

      Not sure if you can use plugins with the express version of VS2k5, but they are giving them away for free. No strings attached. Can build commercial programs, whatever you want to do.
  • Now all customers that used this code are stuck at the current version of Perl, never to be able to upgrade. ...And Microsoft calls the GPL viral?! Microsoft with the license they allowed activestate, to use there code with, would be called what? Radioactive code or nuclear code?

    • Re:And MS says that the GPL is viral (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      GPL is viral. Most of the work ActiveState did was write an integration layer with the VS IDE. I bet their integration layer code can be released, but what good is that unless you have the VS shell?

      Anyway, VS IDE produces code. You should still be able to edit that code in your favourite editor and compile it with your favourite compiler.
  • Never used it since it required a VS license, but i was wondering if there are any *good* visual IDEs that work with Python.

    And no, i dont mean someting like IDLE, i mean a true visual IDE with drag and drop widgets, etc.
    • A lot of people have already mentioned the PyDev [sf.net] plugin for Eclipse [eclipse.org]. You may also like to know about TruStudio [xored.com] (another Eclipse-based IDE) which supports Python and PHP amongst other "scripting languages", and perhaps something like Stani's Python Editor [stani.be]. I've got all three, plus a couple of other generic editors like Vim [vim.org], Notepad++ [sf.net], NewEdit [tigris.org], JEdit [jedit.org], also PythonWin [python.org] (which comes with ActivePython, but you can get it separately for vanilla Python.org).
      • While i agree that in many cases a simple text editor with highlighting is great, i specifically said that isn't what i was looking for.

        But what i was looking for is a *real* ide, which includes internal debugging, RCS control, project management, and graphical tools for creating a GUI.

        Ive seen this for other languages like Java, but nothing for Python ( that was actually stable enough to rely on ). All ive seen is glorified text editors, which for large projects would be a nightmare. ( but find for simple

  • umm.. try pspad! (Score:5, Informative)

    by thrillbert ( 146343 ) * on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:53PM (#14268609) Homepage
    I've been using it for about a month and love it. I love the price too, it's FREE as in somethingrather.. And it not only works with perl, but also with C++, PHP, Python, HTML.. and a ton more.. even text files look better!

    http://www.pspad.com [pspad.com]

    ---
    The moon may be smaller than Earth, but it's further away.

  • Eclipse is a Joke (Score:4, Interesting)

    by N8F8 ( 4562 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @08:22PM (#14268775)
    Before you flame me or mod me a troll please try both IDEs. I did. Eclipse is flaky and slow. Visual Stuio is slick and fast. Right now I use SciTe [scintilla.org] editor but I'm gonna be using Visual Studio if I have to write a free PHP plugin myself. I develop for a living and when it comes to productivity I just cannot use an IDE that flakes out or bogs down every 30 seconds. Even Zend Studio is a bugfest. I'm not gonna pay for the privledge of debugging someone else's software.

  • Different Worlds (Score:4, Insightful)

    by echusarcana ( 832151 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @08:51PM (#14268986)

    Perl plus VisualStudio - I can see why this does not really sell. ActiveState's Perl is an excellent product however and it is surprising how well applications run on it between Windows and UNIX.

    An IDE typically reflects a programming environment where coding must be spread across a multitude of small files. In it's extreme, I'm not a big fan of this style as I don't think it documents the code well. An IDE often kicks in a build system, a debugger, a configuration management system, perhaps even a work management system. Integrated into one product none of these components is going to be ideal compared to dedicated tools. It much like an integrated stereo system - yes it does everything, but it will never sounds as good as discrete audio components.

    I'm hard pressed to why one needs something more than emacs (a rabid few might argue it is the only application one would ever need!). Admittedly customizing emacs in Lisp is not exactly easy to learn...

    The bottom line is that Microsoft fans (who would shell out big bucks for VisualStudio) are typically not going program in Perl. Similarly, those of us more familiar with the UNIX world aren't going to program in VisualBasic whatever its possible merits might be. The two worlds just don't cross much, we don't read the same web pages, we don't go to the same conferences.
    • One big plus of VS is its debugger. I prefer it hands-down over gdb. gdb is quite powerful, but cryptic. Sometimes it doesnt show the backtrace, sometimes it simply ignores breakpoints, and it is VERY helpful if I can click on the line with the access violation and the editor jumps to the source file & line, while having several watch windows with the variables I entered showing their values etc. I know this can be done with gdb too but not as fast and comfortable. Then again, I can imagine that a gdb i
      • I've done some programming on my Powerbook 12" using XCode, and apart from the really annoying 'integration' with the layout tool, the overall effect is pretty good. I've only seen a single crash, and that was from me slamming the autocomplete feature a bit more frequently than it was ready for.

        The GDB based visual debugging works great, and for *once* a tool is actually on a par with MSVC 6, which is the primary tool of my bread and butter programming job.

        In short, if you want a stable programming and debu
  • Use the LEO editor instead. It's a bit of a brainfuck, but once you get the hang of it, your productivity will skyrocket. Seriously, you can expect a 20-30% increase in productivity.

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