Something For (Almost) Every Developer

First up, reader martinjlogan sends along a tutorial for setting up a workable Erlang/OTP development environment on a Mac. Next, reader acid06 notes news of Perl 5.12, including what may be the first delivered fix for the Y2K38 bug. (Hit the Read More link below for some details on Perl's new release strategy.) "After two years of development, the new major version of Perl is now available. Notable new features are: better Unicode support, proper support for time after the Y2038 barrier, new APIs to allow developers to extend Perl with 'pluggable' keywords and syntax, warnings for deprecated features and more. From the linked post: You can get it from the CPAN right now or wait for a platform-specific release (such as Strawberry Perl for Windows)." Finally, from reader snydeq: "InfoWorld's Martin Heller provides an in-depth review of Visual Studio 2010 and finds Microsoft taking several large steps away from its legacy IDE code. 'Visual Studio 2010 is a major upgrade in functionality and capability from its predecessor. Developers, architects, and testers will all find areas where the new version makes their jobs easier. Despite the higher pricing for this version, most serious Microsoft-oriented shops will upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 and never look back,' Heller writes. Chief among the improvements are Microsoft's revamping the core editing and designer views to use WPF, its overhaul of IntelliSense and support for test-driven development, and its intelligent support for multiple versions of the .Net Framework."

Re: Perl. This release cycle marks a change to a time-based release process. Beginning with version 5.11.0, we make a new development release of Perl available on the 20th of each month. Each spring, we will release a new stable version of Perl. One month later, we will make a minor update to deal with any issues discovered after the initial ".0" release. Future releases in the stable series will follow quarterly. In contrast to releases of Perl, maintenance releases will contain fixes for issues discovered after the .0 release, but will not include new features or behavior.

Whew!

[Anonymous Coward]

proper support for time after the Y2038 barrier

Good to know that my time machine written in PERL will no longer malfunction due to improperly handled timestamps! Now to test this baby out. This knob here, this button here, and... %^$%^$%^$%^$%^ NO CARRIER

Re:So...

[crazycheetah]

Welcome to Slashdot!

Re:2K38?

[moteyalpha]

I think that 2K-10 is even better. 2K-10=(1024*2)-10=2048-10=2038=(2^11)-10

Just to clarify...

[Valdrax]

%^$%^$%^$%^$%^ NO CARRIER

Just to clarify, does that actually do something in Perl?

Re:IDEs

[ClosedSource]

"It's always been very snappy on Windows"

Hmm. And I always thought that "snappy" implied fast and responsive. I guess not.

Bugs? Impossible!

[AliasMarlowe]

bugs would creep in, undoubtedly

Impossible, if you follow Micosoft's guidelines, such as those published in the Microsoft Programming Series book by Steve Maguire: "Writing Solid Code: Microsoft Techniques for Developing Bug-free C" ISBN 978-1556155512
Microsoft uses these very techniques themselves, in every single one of their bug-free programs. Uh, on second thoughts...

Re:Stereotyping?

[Haxamanish]

I really hoped there would be something in this thread for Prolog programmers who write their time-critical code in assembler, but I was disappointed again.