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XAML is to XUL what J++ (or c#) is to Java: Microsoft "innovation". They see a promising technology, reimplement (badly, if not ass-backwards) it to suit their purposes, call it new, and the PHB's are none the wiser.

Since it's against MS's interests to be cross platform, and XAML/Avalon is Longhorn/XP+SP3 (IE7) only, users/corporations have no choice but to choose the original technology, or pay for another ride on the upgrade-go-round.

Applications are already being built in XUL, go check out MozDev, or ActiveState's Komodo, or Nvu. At least one web-based application plans to have an available XUL interface (see my sig).

I'm not sure what license [Perl is] under

Not much profit in that.

A brief survey of the Web didn't really turn up much in the way of details on this project, except a couple of hints that these "chromosomes" are encoded behavior patterns that may be transmitted among machines. I'm thinking of plugins. Or maybe Sex.pm.

This seems fundamentally like building a AI with pretermined valuations of objectives. Pushing the ball towards the goal is worth 50 points, running into a wall -25, inserting antenna into that sexy vixen, model HSR-VI, +1000! All of this however presumes that the act of feeling for biological creatures -- which he claims to emulate -- is fundamentally a discursive act of a calculating mind. But we don't experience feeling as the evaluation of rules, but as a physical or psychological response to stimulation.

On the other hand, code just is instruction that's translated into action via electrical impulses through hardware. It's causal the whole way through, unlike a norm that we humans utilize like "do unto others...". A norm you can violate, but there's no way for a computer to choose to violate this.humpThat(vixen). In that sense perhaps it does have the non-discursive character I think is required to make feeling what it is. Still though, I guess I'd be more impressed if there were a greater physical component to the system. Say, if upon sighting the hot vixen, model HSR-VI, the robot would overheat, thereby causing a failure to concentrate on hitting the soccer ball until satisfaction (and cooling off) were achieved.

I'm presuming this is some sort of weird troll, moderated "informative" for some odd reason (seriously moderator, "informative"? What derf?)

Seriously, if you think the Microsoft development tools are far superior to anything else in the world, then I can only presume you've never used anything else in the world :).

ActiveState Python is what you need on server boxes for quick jobs like that, never failed me yet on the 8 Server 2003 systems at work. (Soon to be looking at migrating to Linux/Samba, however.)

Don't forget Cygwin either. Very useful piece of kit, especially considering the state of the command prompt...

P.S. I can't believe there is not a quick and free way to run perl scripts on Windows.

kybred

• download the zip version of ActivePerl
• fix one or two files
• Burn the directory that contains bin/lib/site onto a CD

I don't have enough time to spend with google, but if you look through some of the windows-oriented perl mailing lists, people have posted the details there.

Erm, not sure if this is a joke or not, however, VB is a language and Visual Studio is the IDE. Not sure what you mean by "command line" language, unless you mean there's no good IDE for it. It's just a language. You can create GUI programs, you can create web pages with it, and you can even created compiled Windows programs using Visual Studio .NET.

Whatever you think of Eolas, you're making a mistake when you try to say they're not a "technical" firm.

Try Komodo, it supports PHP5 and has code completion and tooltips for builtin functions.

It is actually a desktop case (not tower) and makes a nice monitor stand! Not good for much else.

I'm in the same boat, although I do think that it takes an above-average level of computer competency to run Windows XP without spyware problems. Then again, I've always had hardware problems under Linux, so it seems like you need to excel at computers regardless of the OS you're using if you want it to be stable. Or maybe run Mac OS X (I don't know, I haven't tried it).

But yeah, I play games, do .NET coding, surf the Internet, and do school stuff all on Windows. What's nice is that a lot of what seems like Unix-exclusive software also runs on Windows. There's ActivePython, MiKTeX, a large collection of command-line Unix utilities, including wget, and even games such as FreeCiv. Other people might have different needs that necessitate Linux, but Windows runs fine for me.

With that said, Txiasaeia, you might want to try Gentoo for something different in the Linux world. Installation takes a while since it's a very manual process, but the entire distribution makes me feel "cleaner" when I use it (yes, I still take showers). Mandrake feels like absolute bloat to me, but I fell in love with Gentoo once I tried it.

If you use ActiveState's free distribution of Python for Windows, ActivePython, the electronic version of Dive into Python is included in the documentation file under "Helpful Resources". Very handy!

Can you be more specific on how the java language makes looking up functions more easy and how the perl language does not have it or an equivalent feature?

"With java you don't have to memorize ANYTHING"

"you just have to remember the beginning of the word system"

You can't have one or the other, which is it? That's a feature of an IDE, not a language. You can do that in any modern perl IDE.

Then maybe that's why you're confusing simple programming, i.e. skipping patterns (whether in Python, Java, C++) or whatever, vs. programming using patterns to build reliable, robust, maintainable, modifiable, extendable applications.

Let's take MVC (Model-View-Controller). I could write on large simple script in PHP, Python, Perl what have you, quick and simple, gets the job done, I saved some time etc etc. But as you build on it, that solution quickly falls apart, hence the MVC and other time-tested patterns.

I just read about a new CRM based on PHP and MySQL. They emphasize "Fast fast fast" on their website. They don't have any documentation on their architecture, but I'm betting it's 'fast' because they hit the db directly from their web scripts.

Here's an interesting discussions on patterns. Paul Graham seems to be arguing that there is a silver bullet. I remember this guy, he used to say Lisp was the silver bullet. Now I guess he's saying Python is.

1) WSFU is faster (IO/API/...)
2) WSFU is better integrated with win32 architecture (OLE/ODBC/...)
3) WSFU make a lot of things easier than cygwin with windows

BUT, i wouldnt trade cygwin for it, note that i have both installed here. I just isolated what i needed from WSFU and was better than cygwin and added them last in my path. I dont have any preferences, but cygwin is waaay more complete, and you have the +/- the same versions of the application that runs on linux. Same config files work fine, same behaviours (which isnt the case with WSFU), etc.

For me, WSFU is just a little + to cygwin.

Now bout your particular problem (prod env, 24x7), I've experienced very few problems running CygWin in such an environment. I use it since at least 5 years (I remember downloading it at 56k, so it's probably more), but there's some things you need to be aware with cygwin:

• Versions of the applications you run: they often differs from what you're used to. Sometimes I ended up with different settings between solaris, linux, win32, etc. This is generally fixed with a recompile of the common denominator version, possibly the latest one.
• Performances: As you probably noticed from the other posts, cygwin is an emulation layer. It is slow. And I really mean slow. Something you usually do in nunux in a few seconds might take a few minutes on win32 depending on how it is coded. Forks and threads are really badly implemented. Yet nobody else did better.
• Alternatives: Frequently natives win32 programs are faster, better, or both. Have a look on google after alternatives (adding +win32 +unix, and +free if money is a problem). It will save you some time. Maintaining several branches of your scripts might be a good investment, if you factor out the common base, and manage to get them do what they should on different platforms while compiling/installing (and anyway if you start nunux/win32, you might as well just do that, you'll end up with the pot). Though it perhaps require another employee, it's worth it. For cygwin alternatives I'd recommend the SFU (of course), Mingw, GNU utilities for Win32
• The DLL Nightmare (Take II): If you dont need too much apps (.exe) relative to cygwin it could be good to just use those. Compile the stuff you want in cygwin, and modify the $INSTALL path, so you can just take that to another machine. The DLL hell here is that you'll probably not only need the cygwin dll but some more... If you have quickview installed on your machine, you can see what DLLs a program use in its Import Section (from the PE header). Else i would recommend OllyDBG (free) or PE Explorer ($$$). Both can lists what DLLs an app use, just find them, and copy them in the folder, et voila! you can use it elsewhere.
• Perl: DO NOT USE the cygwin version of perl, unless you have a really good reason to do so. Instead use Active Perl It's damn faster. If it's called from bash then put #!/c:/perl/bin/perl5 -- or where ever you installed it). Some other things to know about active state perl on win32:
  • Hiding the cmd.exe box when running a script: Instead of putting '.pl' at the end of your scripts, try '.wsf' and have a look at the examples given by ActiveState:
    <Job ID="MyJobID">
    <script language=PerlScript>
    # ... your code here ...
    </script

If you're using a fair bit of Perl on windows you probably want to use Active state Perl. It's pretty nice, and you'll have no problem installing pretty much any module you'll need. If your scripts are written well (i.e. not doing platform specific system calls) then porting will be almost a non-issue.

• UNXUtils http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ and
• ActivePerl http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/.

The reason that Python on .NET is of interest is due to past research implying that the CLR is not a suitable environment for dynamic languages. IronPython shows that it this is not the case, and that in many situations the generic CLR may provide faster execution times than language-specific virtual machines.

Ada, Assembler (NASM, MASM), AutoIt, Avenue, Batch files (MS-DOS), Baan, Bash, Bullant, C/C++/C#, CSS, diff files, E-Script, Eiffel, Erlang, Fortran, Forth, HTML (with embedded JavaScript, VBScript, PHP and ASP), IDL - both MSIDL and XPIDL, Java, JavaScript, LISP, LOT, Lout, Lua, Make, Matlab, Metapost, MMIXAL, nnCron, NSIS, Octave, Pascal/Delphi, Perl (most of it except for some ambiguous cases), PostScript, POV-Ray, Python, Ruby, Scheme, scriptol, Specman E, SQL and PLSQL, TeX and LaTeX, Tcl/Tk - using the cpp lexer, VB and VBScript, Verilog, XML, YAML

To be fair, Visual Studio .NET (2002 edition and higher) has Perl, Python, and XSLT , and there's also PHP available. I've personally used all of these when on Windows, and the quality is pretty nice. Komodo always seemed to have problems on my 'slow' 600Mhz computer with speed. It'd take far too long to do anything, with a great deal of lag inherent in using the Mozilla codestuff to make such an IDE, though on Linux I almost always use KDevelop or Anjuta, which I believe support several of the mentioned languages.

To be fair, Visual Studio .NET (2002 edition and higher) has Perl, Python, and XSLT , and there's also PHP available. I've personally used all of these when on Windows, and the quality is pretty nice. Komodo always seemed to have problems on my 'slow' 600Mhz computer with speed. It'd take far too long to do anything, with a great deal of lag inherent in using the Mozilla codestuff to make such an IDE, though on Linux I almost always use KDevelop or Anjuta, which I believe support several of the mentioned languages.

To be fair, Visual Studio .NET (2002 edition and higher) has Perl, Python, and XSLT , and there's also PHP available. I've personally used all of these when on Windows, and the quality is pretty nice. Komodo always seemed to have problems on my 'slow' 600Mhz computer with speed. It'd take far too long to do anything, with a great deal of lag inherent in using the Mozilla codestuff to make such an IDE, though on Linux I almost always use KDevelop or Anjuta, which I believe support several of the mentioned languages.

Nice try. The real link: http://www.activestate.com/Products/Komodo/

Judging by ActiveState's Visual Perl (and the related products for Python and XSLT), Visual Studio.NET allows you to plug in support for new languages.

It might be worth investigating how hard it would be to adapt the ASP.NET stuff into a PHP IDE which works identically to ASP.NET's, or if necessary re-implement parts of it so that PHP has a comparable Visual Studio interface.

I don't use Visual Studio or ASP.NET, so I've no idea what the IDE is like, but I assume it can't be that special since, after all, we're just talking about website templates and backend code here, right?

Slackware was my first distro too can't remember the version, but it was pre version 1 - old man :-(.
I've just installed Vector Linux 4.0 on my laptop and on an older desktop - it's a good way into a fast efficient no-frills linux system. I'm a windows developer so my work laptop is a w2k machine, to make it bearable I've installed niceties such as bash, gvim and perl. You could use Bochs machine emulator to run w2k under linux. If you dual boot, you can use thunderbird email on a dual boot system with a single mailbox.

Vector linux is easy to install and configure, forget all the folks who think a gui is essential for everything, as a windows developer you'll already know how to hack your way through the registry and various config files. That's all you need to do with slackware too.

You can extend the VS IDE, the ActiveState guys have a great Perl add-in which has intellisense and all new Perl project wizards.

Check it out

I can understand when people hesitate before switching from MS Office to a Linux office suite but it doesn't imply necessarily a platform change (you can run OpenOffice on Windows for instance).

I agree that VS is quite a well designed product but there are quite nice IDEs for Linux (free or not), it just depends on what you want to do.
Komodo is pretty good for Python, as well as KDevelop for C++ (among others). As for Java IDEs the choice is humongous but NetBeans is a neat one.

As I meant to mention in the last post, a properly constructed CGI script and its forms are compatible with generally every web browser.

They can be written in any language that a webserver's configuration supports, whether it is compiled (C, C++) or interpreted (ASP/VBScript, Perl). IIS even has plugins for some generally UNIX oriented languages, such as perl.

User State tracking (aka Sessions) and an appropriate library can also be used to auto-fill forms when the browser has an error. Alternatively, EMCAScript (AKA Javascript AKA Jscript) can be used to check the syntax of forms before they are passed to the form processor.

After all is said and done, there isn't anything that IE+C# can do that another solution cannot.

There's very few things Linux will do that Windows won't. But Windows holds the dominant market share and has a lot more commercial support. That's why I (mostly) use Windows.

I was about about to point out WSH as well. As long as the terminal is running Windows 2000 or XP, WSH is actually a usable technology.

Also, if you already know Perl, ActiveState released a COM-scripting library for use in this application called ActivePerl. It will allow you to write windows shell scripts with perl if you'd prefer.

ActivePerl Product Page

def qsort(L):
if len(L) <= 1: return L
return qsort( [ lt for lt in L[1:] if lt < L[0] ] ) + \
[ L[0] ] + qsort( [ ge for ge in L[1:] if ge >= L[0] ] )

If you're not doing commercial work, you could try Komodo, which doesn't cost too much ($29.95) for the noncommercial license. You can try it for free for 21 days first to see if you like it.

So, if you think you could afford it, it's definitely worth a look. It doesn't have any GUI designing tools, but it does have project management and an integrated debugger.

There isn't really a full *IDE* for python that I've ever found. Most are just editors.

The best python editor that I've found, IMO, is PythonWin IDE (not to be confused with PythonWin, which is a python GUI library for windows). PythonWin IDE comes with Active State Python. Great for editing your python with good syntax coloring, auto-indent, and code completion. Very stable, good performance.

Oh, I should mention: It's Windows only. Sorry if that locks you out, or anything. I've never tried to run it with WINE, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Now, you mention you had trouble with boa. You're going to want to get it working unless you want to spend some money, because for $0.00 that's as good as it's going to get. Otherwise the two above are good investments. IIRC Komodo has a free version, but I'm not sure. PythonWorks had great potential but it's not being developed any more. It only supported Tkinter anyway.

That's as far as GUI designer support. If you're not having any luck you might want to try wxWorkshop. I've heard some people have luck embedding their dialogs in C++ libraries and binding them to Python programs. YMMV.

If all you want is a good Python editor with debugger support there are a bunch of them out there:

http://drpython.sourceforge.net
http://pype.sourceforge.net/ (more mature)

Personally the best Python-specialized editor I've used is IDLE, though it has no GUI capabilities. IDLE ships with the full Python distribution for Linux and Windows, and it behaves essentially the same in both platforms.

You might also want to check this article out. And of course, the clearing house.

If you like Visual Studio, then why not use it?

• Eric3
• Kimodo
• IDLE (included with Python).
• Black Adder ($$)
• Wing IDE ($$)

I may be biased, but Perl is robust.

You can start her off with very simple line-by-line programming (e.g. print "Hello World") and progress toward to structures.

Perl has the added benefit that it has instant gratification, little object-orientation, and above all is free. This is the Windows version.

If there still is any doubt, I taught myself to programming reading the camel book in middle school. It is very beginner friendly!

Fedora Core 2, ehh. Its okay. One major problem for me...

Activestate's Komodo dosen't work. I found out the hard way. Although the next version of their IDE will work on Fedora, I'm still switching back to SuSE (ahh, Novell) 9.1 for my workstation. Fedora only gets an 'ehh' review from me.

Active State, Electronic Arts, Mainframe, etc...

• GNU emacs for win32
• Perl for Win32
• Core GNU unix utils for Win32 (sorry, cygwin is just too much hard work to keep it all working)
• Visual Studio v.whatever for VB, C++ etc. (whatever "the job" is)
• WinZip to unpack stuff above, and then to regularly curse how crap it is in so many ways
• All the SysInternals stuff, RegMon, FileMon, etc.
• Personal copy of Perforce to keep track of stuff I write from day one.

and for Linux - postfix, squirrelmail, screen, apache, mysql, squid, php, courier-imap, rsync, cvs - in no particular order

posted this list at my blog too - First Ten Programs

and for Linux - postfix, squirrelmail, screen, apache, mysql, squid, php, courier-imap, rsync, cvs - in no particular order

posted this list at my blog too - First Ten Programs

1st, the "asker" did not have to specify that he used Windows. To my knowledge, that OS is the only one that needs a booster shot every 12 months or so. Disclaimer: I don't know much about Windows, but I did use it for a while a few years ago. Anyway, the top 10 software installs are very different depending on who you are, and I would guess that you know better than I or anyone else what you need to install.

On windows, can't you just do a print screen or something with the "Installed Applications" section of the control panel? Go through that list and simply put a check besides the ones that you "need" and chalk the other apps as something that was just an experiment. You could also take a look at your "Program Files" folder if thats any easier or different than the control panel.

I also found it interesting what programs you picked to install. I havn't heard of Trillian, Azureus, GKrellM, or PowerDVD. Most windows users throw Office on there in minutes of an install. A small percentage install a more featurefull web browser. Many throw a bunch of games. On a Windows system, I personally had to install VIM, UN*X toys like ncftp, cygnus, Perl, and whatever the latest mozilla variant that does web stuff. Of course Putty so I can go to other machines too. Oh yeah, I also think its necessary for windows to have antivirus software and that antispyware stuff too. (Fun!)

Instead of asking millions of strangers what software you should install on your computer that you use all the time and apparently have been for multiple years to know what kind of maintence that you have to do to keep your system running, maybe you should ask yourself if its really worthwhile to spend this much time annually to do such a thing. I have never reinstalled Solaris, Linux, or anything for that matter besides Windows and DOS. I have only done minor OS/kernel upgrades, its not worth my time to upgrade or fix somthing that is not already broken. I get a new personal machine every 2.5-5 years, and spend about a month or two tweaking it to how I want, and its a pain. During that time I'm always finding something that I missed, and need to go out to download it. I like getting new hardware, but I hate the time spent to get it up to par. So, can anyone else help this guy figure out what software he needs to put on his computer? (Ask Slashdots are getting worse here laterly).

Quick, somebody tell ActiveState!

Nice. I'm planning on learning how to tie scripting (have decided on Perl yet but it's a contender) and databases this summer anyway. This book might make the decision as to what to use for me.

However, for those just picking up Perl for the first time I recommend the free ebook Picking Up Perl, and the ActiveState Perl Interpreter for Windows (this was a while ago-- if you are using Linux it probably aleraday has Perl installed). And then as it was Windows I was learning Perl on I used OpenPerl IDE. For Linux I recommend using Kate and Konsole.

Not trying to be off-topic here but I figure someone reading this may want to try out what this Perl thing is.

Disclaimer: Not a Perl fan at all, I actually perfer Python, but to each their own and as any Perl hacker can appreciate TIMTOWTDI! ;)

Komodo is written in XUL with xpcom+python.

The effort of doing that pretty much made me realize that your other comment is quite true, XUL is way too embedded in mozilla. My python+wxWidgets display layer was smaller than the mozilla installation by far.

However, XUL + mozilla + xpcom + python is still incredibly powerful, Active States' Komodo is written in this fashion and is quite popular. David Ascher gives quite good talks on the development process. I would love to see him write a book on the subject. A good (if dated) interview is located here.

Komodo, perhaps?

From the Features page:

Built on Mozilla
Komodo is built on the Mozilla platform. Portions of Komodo were created using source code governed by the Netscape Public License (NPL) and the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The source code for the portions of Netscape 6 governed by the NPL and MPL is available from under those licenses.

How about the Activestate IDE, Komodo?