ActiveState Discontinues VisualPerl/Python

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..."

Comments

They what? Oh....

[gbulmash]

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.

Re:Rub my penis and cause a rupture

[LiquidCoooled]

For a minute there I thought this was just another example of perl code.
My bet is its still compilable.

Welcome To Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Visual Studio??? + Perl???

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

Yeeeechhh!!!

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Saxophonist]

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.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[AuMatar]

No, that would be Cobol. Except for the 9th level, where you're forced to use ML.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[temojen]

Visual Studio + lisp.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[raider_red]

That's in the nineth ring. In the eighth, they just use Visual Studio.

It's not the Perl that's hell, it's using it under Windows, which is hell in itself.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[castlec]

spell it correctly!!!
it's lithp :o)

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Dhar]

What is it with the "+" crap?

Just Visual Studio is hell enough, thanks.

-g.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[mslinux]

(((((Visual Studio)))) (+) (((((((((((((((lisp))))))))))))))

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Theatetus]

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 mine

Besides, there's no better IDE out there than SLIME on Emacs.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Theatetus]

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).

Re:Welcome To Hell

[deathy_epl ccs]

OK, I'm thinking that what springs to mind for ME when I hear ML is not the same as what springs to mind for you guys... I think Machine Language and, as an old school kinda guy, I think "How is coding Machine Language hell?" Then, I Google up some Caml to try and figure out what the heck you guys are talking about, dig up a little bit of source code and find that it is, in fact, an ugly ugly thing.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[ScoLgo]

"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

[pthisis]

Shouldn't that be:
(+ (Visual Studio) (lisp))

Re:Welcome To Hell

[ShyGuy91284]

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))....

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not surprising that one who can't understand the simple beauty of LISP laughs at words that sound like genitals. Not a coincidence there.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

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 be (get journal (get geoffreyerffoeg slashdot)) in LISP-like syntax, which looks less intuitive.

Of course there's no difference in the code. Same tokens, slightly more explicit association. But if you're going to deviate from what people know already, use RPN: x y get g f. Two advantages: first, it almost never requires parentheses needed (fine, if you want an arbitrary-length list, that's not true), and second, it's in order. The computer first gets x, then finds the offset of y from it, then retrieves the value of y, then evaluates g, then evaluates f. The latter two are important: f(g(x)) means g then f, which could throw you off if you're going quickly. If I said f(x)=print 2, return x^2 and g(x)=print 3, return x^2, then what would you instinctively say that print f(g(5)) gave? It's easier to see that 5 g f print gives 3, then 2, then 625.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[timeOday]

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)

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Theatetus]

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?

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Theatetus]

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.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Rufty]

This example contains two sets of brackets:
                f(g(x->y));

This contains three. C'mon - even lithp coderth can count!
                (f (g (get 'y x)))

50% redundancy in the RSI inducing department, that's why lithp HURTS!!!

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Nataku564]

My favourite language is Perl, and I dislike lisp's syntax. That says something.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[TheLink]

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?

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell would you use a *macro* to write a simple math expression? Wow, I mean, I know LISP heads love using macros excessively (and unnecessarily), but that seems going a little bit overboard to make up for some basic expressivity problems in the language...

More legible? Come on... Nobody doing serious math is going to think that. Having to read and write algorithms "inside out" is not more "legible."

As for ^ -- it is a language dependent operator. It depends on the language and context as to what it does. It's often short hand for something raised to another power in most non-C contexts.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

(/ (- (sqrt (- (* b b) (* 4 a c))) b) (* 2 a))

Dear god! No wonder lisp went out with the dodo. This is proof that just because something is conceptually simple doesn't mean it's not a giant cluster-fuck. When you look at a single s-expression. it's like looking at a single zebra stripe. When you look at a lisp program, it's like trying to count the zebras in a herd.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[timeOday]

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

I wrote it in matlab / octave :)

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Theatetus]

Why the hell would you use a *macro* to write a simple math expression?

You would use it to generate the appropriate function at compile (or failing that, run) time and pass it to the arguments. I mean, if you somehow knew you were only ever going to use that one function you would pre-define it and probably inline it, but in a real situation...

Wow, I mean, I know LISP heads love using macros excessively (and unnecessarily)

I'm trying to think of how any macro that doesn't break the program is "unneccessary" and I can't. Macros make decisions at compile time that then don't have to be made at run time. They're brilliant.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[gbobeck]

Visual Studio + intercal OR Visual Studio + fortran.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

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 would give {1, 2+3+4} = 1 9; 1 2 3 4 4 multiplus would give {1+2+3+4} = 10.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see...

You would use it to generate the appropriate function at compile (or failing that, run) time and pass it to the arguments.

This makes no sense. First of all, macro's happen at compile time, not run time -- that's the whole point of them. Secondly, why would you use a macro here instead of a standard function? It can't be for optimization purposes because once the macro is expanded, the code is going to be compiled just as if the function had been written out by hand originally. I can't see any real need to use a macro here, even if you need to use this expression in a function throughout the code -- simply use higher order functions for that.

So, care to explain again why you would use a macro here, other than simply for the sake of using a macro?

Macros make decisions at compile time that then don't have to be made at run time. They're brilliant.

Macros have uses, but those uses usually include metaprogramming for complex code/data related structural problems, not simple math expressions. The former is a legitimate usage (sometimes -- often simple higher order programming suffices), the latter is an abuse.

And again, during the compilation phase, a macro is simply going to be expanded to normal code and then compiled. You aren't "gaining" anything here by using a macro in the sense of some nifty decision "being made at compile time that doesn't have to be made at runtime."

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Translated:

(+ (Visual Studio) (scheme))

Re:Welcome To Hell

[penguin-collective]

That would be

(+ VisualStudio lisp)

And it's a whole lot better than what is currently popular, namely:

<?xml version = "1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/tr/xhtml1/DT D/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<document>
<enumerat ion mode="plus">
<item>VisualStudio</item>
<item>XML </item>
</enumeration>

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it's more parenthetic (but also more legible)

You are kidding. More legible? No chance. I look at the infix form, and at a glance I recognise the equation and know exactly what it's for. I look at the prefix form, and I don't have a clue what it's supposed to do.

And this is coming from an OCaml programmer who is perfectly comfortable with external parentheses and prefix notation for many things - I'm used to thinking in terms of

let f x = Map.find x some_map

which is much more similar to the Lisp-like

(define f (lambda x (find some-map x)))

than to the nearest thing in a mainstream language, which would be something like

VALUE_T my_find(KEY_T x)
{
  return some_map.find(x);
}

(with tedious definitions of KEY_T and VALUE_T elsewhere).

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there are those of us who laugh at words that sound like genitals *and* love the abstract simplicity of lisp. Now what does that tell you?

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Bob Uhl]

There's no inherent reason to prefer (get x 'y) over (get 'y x); Lisp lets you use either, as you like. And with a macro it could be as simple as (get x y) or (get y x). Or, since Lisps almost always give one more freedom with symbol names than other languages, (-> x y) or (- y x).

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Bob Uhl]

One of the major advantages (perhaps the major advantage) of Lisp notation is macros: the ability to write code which writes code at compile time (and, even better, doesn't write some code at compile time, thus performing optimisations which speed up run time). In mathematics there's no real benefit gained thereby: one can get the same effect with any notation in math--methinks this is part of why mathematicians are so fond of inventing operators.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[kisrael]

I dunno, I don't think Perl on Windows is so awful.

I wouldn't neccesarily want to do a server project, and I don't think there's a GUI library for it worth a damn, but for the usual admin-y file crunching and what not it's not much worse than on *Nix.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Tiny Elvis]

The macro will transform the INFIX expression (which Lisp doesn't parse) into PREFIX (which it does). So the code could read:

(defun typical-lisp-code (arg1 arg2 x)
      (let* ((a (some-function arg1))
            (another-value #i'(arg2^2 + a*x)/x^2 - arg1/arg2')) ...
)


(indentation is slightly off because I can't figure out how to get <tt> to work right)

The macro will translate the '(arg2^2 + a*x)/x^2 - arg1/arg2' into real lisp code. Since it is a macro and does code expansion in place, the expanded code can reference lexically visible variables. You couldn't do that by passing '(arg2^2 + a*x)/x^2 - arg1/arg2' to a function. The function would not be able to see the variables it needs to see. However you could also define a local function here that can see those variables. It could compute the value and return it. However that would be at runtime.

That said, generally I wouldn't bother trying to cram infix notation into my program. I would just write it as prefix. Unless the program was loaded with expressions like that it is not worth the trouble.

More generally speaking here is another advantage of prefix. I can say things like (+ v1 v2 v3 v4) instead of v1 + v2 + v3 + v4 and even:


(let ((var (list 1 2 3 4))
            (var2 (some-func-returning-list-of-int)))
      (apply #'+ (append var var2)))

Of course you could just write a function to sum a list. But you have to write such a function for any operation you want to perform on a list that way.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Tiny Elvis]

It could compute the value and return it. However that would be at runtime.

Sorry this is not clear. In both cases the value is computed at runtime. However using a function the expression is also parsed at runtime.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[TheoMurpse]

(-b+sqrt(b^2-4*a*c))/(2*a)

Didn't you actually mean
(-b±sqrt(b^2-4*a*c))/(2*a)
;)

Re:Welcome To Hell

[angel'o'sphere]

Well,

wether x^2 is bitwise or or power by 2 depends on the language. In pascal/modual it is power by to.

Well, with this example you self answered your original question about: parenthesis-phobes ;D

Because this: (-b+sqrt(b^2-4*a*c))/(2*a) is not onyl easy to read, but I even see at first glance that it is the function giving the zero points of a parabolic equation. Becasue I have seen or used this function already several thousand times.

This:
(/ (- (sqrt (- (* b b)
(* 4 a c)))
b)
(* 2 a))

I simply can't read, I have to parse it parenthesis by parenthesis and to translate it into a standard infix form in my head until I see the formula like it is written in math, now finally I understand the formula.

For me the labyrinth of parenthesis is not legible at all.

I guess for you it is, as you say its more legible than the matlab notation :D

angel'o'sphere

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Theatetus]

I can't see any real need to use a macro here, even if you need to use this expression in a function throughout the code -- simply use higher order functions for that.

Yeah, my explanation really missed the point (sorry). I didn't mean to write the quadratic equation as a macro (that would be silly). I meant I usually write macros that write my equations for me. If you write any decent-sized application in lisp you're usually writing to an embedded language you made with macros, anyways.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[TheLink]

But can't you write code that writes code in Perl and many other scripting languages too?

There are also potential security issues whenever you start treating data as code, or let external data significantly influence code generation.

I have looked but have not found any guidelines for doing such things securely in lisp.

On a related note, I have crashed a forth webserver on my first try :).

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Bob Uhl]

But can't you write code that writes code in Perl and many other scripting languages too?

Yes, but it's not really the same thing. Yes, perl, python &c have eval or similar mechanism: they can build a string and then evaluate it. But Lisp is different.

Lisp source code is actually a raw parse tree made up of lists; the first item in each list is the function, and the remaining items are the arguments thereto (there are a very small number of 'special forms' which allow one to refer to a list as a list instead of a function call and so forth). E.g. (+ 1 2 3) calls #'+, which sums its arguments. Well, since the source code is a list of lists, it's very easy to write a function to take source and transform it into something else; this function is called a macro.

A macro can be used to create any sort of special form one wants; it's also a very useful way to perform work at compile time rather than at run time.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[TheLink]

So it's because Lisp is a bit more "consistent/seamless", so it's easier to have code modify itself in meaningful ways?

How easy is it typically to modify such a program to do something different?

Say you have a messaging server for inter module communications, and you want to convert it to a chat server for inter human communications ;). Without glossing over the details and new special cases e.g. protocol changes for human specific requirements.

Would it be easy for an average lisp programmer to understand what was done, if the conversion was done with a bunch of macros? Or would that be the equivalent of getting an average perl programmer to understand one of those perl one-liners?

OK, if you were asked to write a DHCP _server_ in Lisp that stores leases and logic in an RDBMS, what would be the steps? Which Lisp site would you visit first, which modules to consider etc? Or would you just write everything yourself in less than 30 minutes :).

Being not so smart and lazy, I prefer using code written by smarter or more hardworking people, so I currently use perl and CPAN ;).

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Bob Uhl]

I should clear something up: Lisp macros aren't self-modifying code, although it is possible for a Lisp program to define or redefine data &amp; functions at runtime (it can redefine macros, too, but of course anything already compiled won't be affected).

<p>Concerning modification of a program--typically, with well-designed macros, they make it much easier to understand what's going on, and much easier to modify.  An example is with-open-file, which is a macro which takes care of opening a file, assigning its stream to a variable, doing whatever the programmer wants done, and closing the file regardless of errors which may arrive.  Thus the simple

  (with-open-file (file #p"/etc/passwd")
     (print (read-line file)))

which opens /etc/passwd and prints the first line, expands into:

  (let ((file (open #P"/etc/passwd")) (#:g4517 t))
    (unwind-protect
        (multiple-value-prog1 (progn (print (read-line file)))
          (setq #:g4517 nil))
      (when file (close file :abort #:g4517))))

in SBCL (a particular implementation of Common Lisp).  If I wanted to read from an open socket instead, I could write a with-open-socket macro; if I wanted to read from a speech-to-text converter, I could write a with-speech-to-text macro and so on.

<p>A well-designed macro becomes part of the language; a programmer understands what it does just like he understand what split and join do in Perl, or what a CPAN module does.

<p>To answer the specific question, if I wished to write a DHCP server in Lisp and store the leases in a database, I'd probably use CL-SQL for the db interface (it abstracts away different databases and provides an object-oriented way of dealing with tables); I'm not familiar enough with DHCP to know how to write that side of it, but I imagine I'd use sb-bsd-sockets, which provides BSD-style sockets for SBCL (it's my preferred Lisp implementation).  Pretty much the same as with Perl: find a DB library and use the sockets interface provided.

<p>CLiki serves in many ways the same function as CPAN.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[TheLink]

Thanks. I think I know a bit more about Lisp now.

As mentioned I'm lazy and not so smart, I wouldn't want to have to reimplement split, join or map. Nor would I want to always have to figure out how someone's variant of those work.

For the DHCP server thing, with perl I'd go use stuff like "Net::DHCP::Packet" and "Net::RawIP".

But unfortunately, perl is kinda slow, compared to common lisp. A fast high level language would be nice. Sure you can write your own languages with Lisp. Trouble is you might end up with multiple languages for each Lisp programmer.

While that might not be as bad as C programmers reimplementing stuff that's standard in other languages in different ways (more often than not - poorly), I don't see it as such a great thing.

I guess Lisp is a bit like having a GUI that's totally and rapidly configurable and comes mostly unconfigured, but the users don't mind totally configuring it just for the task at hand - it's easy for them to do so I guess.

Whereas I'd want a GUI that already comes with defaults (mouse pointer, clipboard, taskbar, menu etc), but one where you can change the defaults if you need to.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Bob Uhl]

As mentioned I'm lazy and not so smart, I wouldn't want to have to reimplement split, join or map. Nor would I want to always have to figure out how someone's variant of those work.

Oh, that's not really any more of a problem than figuring out someone's CPAN module works. And you don't really need to worry about a different dialect of Lisp for each programmer--it actually works out pretty nice (there are Lisp dialects, but they are essentially different languages which share similar ideas).

I think what you're saying is that you enjoy having a language with lots of pre-built modules, such that you can tie them together to achieve your goals. That's really not so much a characteristic of the language as it is of community around it. But me saying that doesn't help you if there's a library you'd like which doesn't exist--OTOH writing such libraries is often pretty fun! There is a short list of Common Lisp packages at cliki.net; there are lots more out there, though. Some recent interesting work has been done in auto-wrapping C libraries for easy use from Lisp.

One unfortunate thing in a language like Perl or Python is that often to get good performance one must write the innards of a module in some other language like C--in Common Lisp this isn't a factor: just write it in Lisp, compile it and it runs as fast as possible (in some domains, faster than C, in most somewhat more slowly).

Something you might like about CL is its object system, which is very easy to use, and yet can be extended to do some pretty crazy things.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[TheLink]

While I definitely like having lots of prefab around, with respect to that point, I was talking about not having to reimplement things as basic as split and join. It would be bad to have to look for the relevant modules from CPAN just to do split, join, map, associative arrays. Plus one would have to figure out which ones are best etc.

It was a really good idea to have those as standard/defaults- they are useful for a very wide range of problems. By having those stuff as built-ins, programmers like me won't get those wrong, and people would be able to understand exactly what I'm doing when I use them (and possibly whether I'm screwing up or not). And average programmers can code reasonable solutions for many common tasks in a short space of time.

To me, not having something like split and join, is almost as bad as not having "print" or other basic stuff (for some reason Java comes to mind even though they do have print, I wonder why ;) ).

As for performance, Python+Pysco seems to have semidecent performance except for certain math (floating point?). So I'm just wondering if Perl would get that level of performance some time soon.

Still Perl performance is often quite tolerable given that CPUs are so powerful nowadays - I have written perl network servers that handle one to two thousand requests a second (or a bit more). Not that fast, but you usually run out of network bandwidth first ;). In other cases you'd run out of disk IO bandwidth - unless you've got a fair number of disk striped together.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Bob Uhl]

While I definitely like having lots of prefab around, with respect to that point, I was talking about not having to reimplement things as basic as split and join. It would be bad to have to look for the relevant modules from CPAN just to do split, join, map, associative arrays.

Common Lisp supports the equivalents of join, map & associative arrays as part of the standard; there is an equivalent to split easily available (it's called split-sequence and is pretty nice).

No argument that things like that are nice. It is kinda funny, though: people used to complain that the Common Lisp standard was too large--after all, it included things like OS-independent pathnames, and object orientation, and hash tables, and condition handling (like exceptions, but more powerful)! Now the criticism is from the other direction: Common Lisp is too small, because it doesn't include an HTTP server as part of the standard:-)

Re:Welcome To Hell

[TheLink]

"Common Lisp is too small, because it doesn't include an HTTP server as part of the standard"

Heh. Well, definitely won't want it to do things like php ;). So many ways to do things the wrong way, so few to do it right (worse if constrained by crappy existing code).

Anyway, I should go take a look at Lisp again some time (I did try some time ago).

Given that things appear to be headed down the multi-cpu path, I think there's a chance for Lisp to try to get greater marketshare.

I figure Prolog should be good at using multi-cpus too.

Re:Welcome To Hell

[Bob Uhl]

If you're interested, take a gander at Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel. It's an excellent introduction to the language.

Re:They what? Oh....

[Amouth]

I felt the same way.. and am happey that it is just the add on's.. that should have been worded better in the posting..

Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Too Obscure

[justanyone]

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.

Re:Too Obscure

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't used Visual Perl, but presumably it's just a tool for producing Perl code, the same Perl code that you would end up with if you typed it in Notepad. Surely the tool is not considered architecture or design?

Re:Rub my penis and cause a rupture

[vishbar]

From grandparent:

"I hate you, I hate your country, and I hate your face!"

Yup...looks like Perl.

....Or Cygwin

[Ying Hu]

Quite a lot comes with it.

Eclipse works fine

[Coryoth]

If you want plugins for a big heavy IDE for Perl and Python then Eclipse still works just fine. For Perl there's EPIC, and for Python there's PyDev. 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

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

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

[pthisis]

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?

Re:Eclipse works fine

[timeOday]

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?

Re:Eclipse works fine

[Repton]

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 unifies the default yank buffer with the clipboard, which vim doesn't, and which I find extremely handy)

Re:Eclipse works fine

[TheDauthi]

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.

Re:Eclipse works fine

[MikeBabcock]

Actually, I only use visual IDEs for the live syntax checking and automatic help pop-ups.

Otherwise, I'm happier with vim 90% of the time.

Re:Eclipse works fine

[vandan]

No ... I like it too. I wish they'd bring out a PPC Linux version, but I suppose that's not really going to happen.

On a completely unrelated topic, does anyone want a 1Ghz Powerbook with 1GB RAM? :)

<burns>Excellent..</burns> Who's next?

[bADlOGIN]

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...

And I didn't even know they were gone.

[radiotyler]

Back to vi/Notepad/Komodo, then..

Uh, back to? Personally, I never left.

Pugin for Eclipse?

[cybergrue]

A quick question. Has anyone made a plugin for Eclipse to handle Perl or any of the other popular scripting languages?

Re:Pugin for Eclipse?

[sugarmotor]

Quick answer: ask google.

EPIC - Eclipse Perl Integration
e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages

Perl + Eclipse = lots of interest | Computerworld Blogs
Yesterday I taught my two Perl/Eclipse classes here at EclipseWorld . ...
Eclipse + Perl, seems a good answer for all people interested on Perl IDEs, ...
www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/891 - 36k - Cached - Similar pages

Re:Pugin for Eclipse?

[Chilliwilli]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rubyeclipse

There's certainly one for Ruby so I'm guess Perl and Python shouldn't be far behind.

Re:Pugin for Eclipse?

[Coryoth]

A quick question. Has anyone made a plugin for Eclipse to handle Perl or any of the other popular scripting languages?

Yes, people have made some very good plugins for Eclipse to handle Perl, Python, and other scripting languages. If you're willing to use Eclipse they turn it into quite a nice environment for the scripting language fo your choice, including debugging, good code completion, on the fly syntax checking and error flagging, and many other nice features.

Jedidiah.

Re:Pugin for Eclipse?

[John Whitley]

For folks working with Rails, it's worth looking at RadRails, available as a standalone IDE (built on the Eclipse RCP), or as an Eclipse plugin.

Re:They what? Oh....

[adisakp]

For a second there, I thought they were discontinuing ActivePerl and almost got angry.

FWIW, there is a perl package in cygwin. If ActivePerl went away, you'd still be able to run perl scripts under windows with a free (as in beer) tool. The cygwin stuff is also "Free" (as in speech) as well.

Re:Rub my penis and cause a rupture

[koreaman]

Am I the only one who finds these funny?

Notepad++

[feebeling]

... or use notepad++, which kicks ass.

Re:Notepad++

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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)

Re:Notepad++

[Servants]

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.

Re:Notepad++

[Anonymous Coward]

Jedit is very good. Good Perl syntax suppport and lots of pluggins.

Re:Notepad++

[mhearne]

My favorite drop-in replacement for notepad is pspad http://www.pspad.com/en/.

It does highlighting and indents for about a dozen computer languages, and has spell-check plugins for as many different spoken languages.

I've been using it for at least 5 years.

Michael

Re:Notepad++

[mysticgoat]

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 about 10 years ago, and have done quite a bit of web development and a few Perl based projects with it.

Another one that I've been looking at lately is Programmer's Notepad. It is not as strong as UE in some ways (more limited in regular expression replacements, for instance), but it is FOSS, which would be more compatible with a teaching project I'm thinking about. (The Portland FOSSL: a Free and Open Source Software Laboratory. Intent is to start developing an office workforce that is competent in OOo, Firebird, Tbird, etc... and also provide local businesses with an opportunity to explore the feasibility of going to FOSS products.)

UltraEdit
Programmer's Notepad
Notepad++

Re:Notepad++

[PerlDudeXL]

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.

Re:Notepad++

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs does syntax highlighting and supports way more programming languages than anything else.

Re:Notepad++

[Servants]

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.

Hmm, thanks. What Notepad++ does for Python that I haven't seen elsewhere, is basically an extension of syntax highlighting -- instead of just being able to choose comment color, you can choose the entire font. The big benefit is that you can make this font small and narrow. Since the affected Python comments always extend to the end of a line, there's no reason they have to be in a fixed-width font; so Notepad++ comments take up less room in the code, and you can see more things at once. I think it's great. The (considerable) downside to this is that the lines will look terrible in most other editors.

Re:Notepad++

[mhearne]

After checking my url yesterday, I realized that I had an old version of PSPad. After upgrading, I noticed that wordwrap did not work anymore.

From the author, Jan Fiala:

"Wordwrap is problematic in the 4.3.3 version.
How to enable WordWrap you can read in the thread:
http://forum.pspad.com/read.php?f=2&i=8034&t=8034

You can download the PSPad 4.5.0 beta version
from the PSPad beta forum
http://forum.pspad.com/list.php?f=6
if you want to have functional WordWrap"

After installing version 4.5.0, all is well.

Michael

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[IAmTheDave]

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, and keep them organized. They allow for compilation without having to write your own batch file. And - especially with VS.NET 2003 and 2005 - intellisense of some sort is simply inseperable from yours truely.

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. Hitting . and having immediate keystroke access to an object's entire interface is a huge time saver. Anyone who thinks they can code at the same speed in notepad/emacs/vi is just plain nuts. Seriously. Nuts. Mod me down if you must but... Still nuts.

unix languages

[shoffsta]

Well, perl and python have their history in UNIX, so I suspect most developers using these languages are comfortable using UNIX editors as well (vi/emacs).
Besides, VS is usually only advantageous (if at all) over vi/emacs when developing really big programs, while Perl and python are scripting languages that are generally used for quick and dirty programs that seldom exceed several thousand lines.

Re:unix languages

[Eravnrekaree]

First, I will say that the notion that Perl is only generally used for small "quick and dirty" programs, or that it is only useful for doing so is atrocious. I have used Perl to write programs that have 10,000+ lines and greater. There really is not much preventing the language being used in such a way, it provides a good environment with needed tools to make it easy. Perl also does not encourage unreadable code, I have found it just as easy to write good code in Perl than other languages.

As far as IDEs, I really cant stand to use emacs or vi, i prefer things like floating windows, its features are great but are not very well exposed in the GUI in my opinion, or the features come short. They need to do better, such as with a MDI GUI window interface mode perhaps, adding more windows, and better exposing all of the features via the GUI so commands are optional, such as a lot more clicky-click and drag and drop sort of things. Ive tried kdevelop before, which lacks much integration with Perl. Indeed, GUI IDEs need much work on *nix, in features also in the area of integration with GUI builders.

Re:They what? Oh....

[Anonymous Coward]

And "s" for "slow" and "as shit".

Visual-Studio is a great IDE, Visual-Python = good

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a windows guy, I hate Microsoft, Visual-Studio is a terrific IDE.
These are all facts, as far as I can judge.

The Visual-Python is a simple, easy and comfortable way to develop python while working on a Windows machine.
It blends in nicely with Visual-Studio and provides all those little things that make writing code nicer easier and sleaker.

Komodo is nice, even very nice, but it's simply not as good as Visual-Studio is from the point of view of a complete IDE.

I just discovered Visual-Python 2-3 months ago... too bad.

Re:Rub my penis and cause a rupture

[milktoastman]

Can you believe we get modded down by replying to a troll with something silly? The parent got modded down, people...enough's enough...let it go. Enjoy your life and stop killing my Karma!!!!

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can. Vim.

Re:They what? Oh....

[greed]

It is also comparitively painless to build Perl natively Windows, given the now-free Visual C++ commandline compiler environment. (We don't do much C++ on Windows where I work, so Visual Studio 6 is still state-of-the-art.)

The native Win32 version does not suffer from any of the issues the Cygwin port has; it's a real Windows program, so you get real Windows paths and so on. It can even look for things like perl5lib in the Registry, if you're into that sort of thing.

vi/Notepad/Komodo??

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean emacs/emacs/emacs.

Monadic!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well,

#!/usr/bin/perl
$_="x";s/X/`map {$0} {_$_}`/gie;$'=~s`X`rm -rf`e;@^T = qw, 3( 2 9 6);
21_PENGUINS, and print map {(1c((split//=>\"\"=>")[$^T>1])..__)[$_]}@^T;

Y ou! :P

All or none, is it?

[hackwrench]

Why don't they just open source the files that don't have the integration code in it, or even release the broken files that would be the result of stripping the intergration codefrom their files? Why does it always have to be all or none?

Re:All or none, is it?

[vondo]

Because the code probably isn't structured to just pass through a pre-processor to strip out the bits that shouldn't be there. Why should they pay someone to sift through the code to remove the proprietary pieces for a product not enough people bought in the first place?

Re:All or none, is it?

[arkanes]

Visual Studio plugins are written as COM components and all the non-trivial bits will neccesarily be heavily intertwined with the VS com interfaces, especially the interesting parts like the editor. I also believe, but I'm not sure since it's been a while since I looked at it, that the license you have to agree to to publish VS extensions precludes open sourcing.

Re:All or none, is it?

[jorgie]

Umm... if you take a *Visual Studion Integration PlugIn* and remove the *Visual Studio integration code* what the hell are you left with to release?

We are not talking about ActiveState/Perl, only the VS plugin...

Jorgie

Re:They what? Oh....

[JordanH]

Here's a list of Perl implementations for Windows. I don't know very much about most of them, but I've heard good things about PXPerl.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[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.

There's not a decent programmer's editor around that doesn't have similar functionality available. Vim and Emacs are just two. No fancy trademark, same great taste.

Anyone who thinks they can code at the same speed in notepad/emacs/vi is just plain nuts.

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.

Broaden your horizons, newbie. Delusions to the contrary aside, you obviously have lost the ability to think for yourself.

Who cares, Visual Studio sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, I use Komodo on Linux and Windows and it totally kicks ass. I haven't downloaded the new version yet but it supposedly supports Ruby and runs on OSX.
How cool is that? A full blown IDE that supports Perl/Python/PHP/TCL/Ruby on Linux/Solaris/OSX/Windows!
I know it's not open source but it totally blows away Eclipse. I've mostly been using it for cross platform Python stuff lately and it is seriously worth the money. I do not work at ActiveState. But I like to support commercial software that's actually good. I know most slashdotters would never even touch it.
Your loss you cheap bastards.

Re:Visual-Studio is a great IDE, Visual-Python = g

[Coryoth]

The Visual-Python is a simple, easy and comfortable way to develop python while working on a Windows machine.
It blends in nicely with Visual-Studio and provides all those little things that make writing code nicer easier and sleaker.

Well there's always PyDev for Eclipse. It's reasonably mature, takes full advantage of what Eclipse has to offer (integration, debugging, code completion etc.) as well as having nice integration of other tools such as bicycle repair man for refactoring and pylint for static checking.

Jedidiah.

Back to vi/Notepad/Komodo, then..."

[McGiraf]

Back to vi/Notepad/Komodo, then..."
it's stops working right away? cannot use it anymore? ...bummer

They're discontinuing it?

[Omicron32]

I can't begin to imagine why.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[speculatrix]

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

Re:Rub my penis and cause a rupture

[LiquidCoooled]

The worst part was mine was ontopic.
I EXPECTED someone to post perl code in this discussion.
Frankly I feel let down.

No surprise there

[Jodka]

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.

Re:No surprise there

[carambola5]

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

Re:No surprise there

[Hugonz]

Does SPE run on OSX?? It is good....

Re:No surprise there

[Chmarr]

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.

Re:No surprise there

[Jodka]

> 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.

Re:No surprise there

[EastCoastSurfer]

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.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Just Some Guy]

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.

And MS says that the GPL is viral

[thinkliberty]

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

[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.

Re:And MS says that the GPL is viral

[jd34]

Post is not referring to a Perl interpreter... it is referring to a plugin for an editing environment. The execution environment of the Perl code written using this plugin remains the usual Perl interpreter, which can still be upgraded. Customers of this product who are still using it to develop or maintain code may have to abandon this plugin and/or use a different editor to get context-sensitive support for new versions of Perl... but anyone who purchases a proprietary software product is really only purchasing the right to use that product, and access to future upgrades is not guaranteed. The justification for proprietary license purchases has to be that the product is useful enough in its current form that it will be worth using even if you have to toss it out the window when the context in which it functions changes. (What if MS had changed the plugin API for VS in a new version?) Don't take those pills the salesmen try to feed you that lead you to believe there will always be upgrades... every company is designed to make money, and in the absence of available source code, one option toward that end is always to leave the customer hanging.

Re:And MS says that the GPL is viral

[thinkliberty]

Ok open your c++ code from VS in to eclipse or other IDE.. It looks really nice in there doesn't it.

Let the CODE FLOW!

[FluffyWithTeeth]

10 print perl

20 return

Wait... Okay, so I haven't taken any computer programming since playing with my texas instruments calculator in maths. Your point? :)

Good news for Komodo

[Anonymous Coward]

Komodo is a decent product, but needs improvement (like adding working templates for Perl/Tk *yay*), code analysis instead of basic syntax checking, real template libraries, etc. Tossing MS overboard is probably a great move for them if it frees up some of their time.

Re:Good news for Komodo

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of code analysis?

Let me be the first to say..

[MikeFM]

*shrugs* Does it matter? If people aren't using the product who is going to care if it is discontinued. Lame idea for a story.

Now, a story on why the products failed might be interesting. A real study in how programmers select tools and what kind of tools they really want. That'd be worthy of discussion.

Re:Let me be the first to say..

[indifferent children]

A story about the pain that developers and organizations are going to go through to switch to a new toolset might also be interesting. Whenever possible, choose OpenSource tools; then no one can take your platform away.

Re:Good!

[Ray]

Well you *nix wussies can use your overblown IDEs like vi but we real men on Windoze just "copy con accounting.pl" and code away.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vi was just a text editor, Vim is a real Emacs.

Re:Rub my penis and cause a rupture

[ilikejam]

Nope. I too love a classic troll.
Bob Goatse for President!

Re:Excellent.. Who's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

A barely used plug-in bites it and you wet your pants?

Oh yeah, Microsoft is totally doomed.

Alternative Python VisualIDEs?

[nurb432]

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.

Re:Alternative Python VisualIDEs?

[Tuross]

A lot of people have already mentioned the PyDev plugin for Eclipse. You may also like to know about TruStudio (another Eclipse-based IDE) which supports Python and PHP amongst other "scripting languages", and perhaps something like Stani's Python Editor. I've got all three, plus a couple of other generic editors like Vim, Notepad++, NewEdit, JEdit, also PythonWin (which comes with ActivePython, but you can get it separately for vanilla Python.org).

Re:Alternative Python VisualIDEs?

[oSand]

Boa Constructor http://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Billosaur]

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.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[pthisis]

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.

Re:Good!

[jtorkbob]

Wow. I haven't done 'copy con' in at least five years. I remember writing autoexec.bat files on boot disks with no edit.com... those were the bad ol' days...

Re:Visual-Studio is a great IDE, Visual-Python = g

[anomalous cohort]

Well there's always PyDev for Eclipse

I tried PyDev for Eclipse but couldn't get the debugging to work. When I installed plone, I found PythonWin in the program files menu. That's the best editor/debugger that I have found for python development so far. It is much faster than Eclipse. Statement completion is spotty for those who like that sort of thing. PythonWin is also Windows only whereas PyDev for Eclipse is cross platform. PythonWin can edit/debug any python program. It is not really tied to plone.

Is my heart broken?

[Timex]

Hardly.

To be perfectly honest, I would place the percentage of perl/python users that needed the IDE to be in the single digits.

Most everyone else has their favorite editor that they would use to generate scripts to get their job done. In Win*, I'd use {vi|textedit|edit}, depending on what was available. Expect most others would be the same way.

Come to think of it, the last time I used an IDE was when I took my first C class in the early 1990s. I think we used Borland C there.

umm.. try pspad!

[thrillbert]

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

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

MS licensing infection is the real story

[pallmall1]

From the article:

Due to the necessary inclusion of Visual Studio integration code in Visual Perl, Visual Python, and Visual XSLT, the plug-ins cannot be open-sourced.

Use anything MS, and your project belongs to them. PERIOD.

Re:MS licensing infection is the real story

[pallmall1]

Use anything MS, and your project belongs to them. PERIOD.

Overrated or untrue? Modders shouldn't dance around the facts.

Now if only...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only the Perl Community would abandon Perl support, the world would be a better place.

Don't forget His Wife

[Anonymous Coward]

Jenny Tubgirl

Re:Don't forget His Wife

[ilikejam]

The First Lady of trolling, if you will.

Re:Excellent.. Who's next?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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?

Eclipse is a Joke

[N8F8]

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 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.

Re:Eclipse is a Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

And I guess you have no clue whatsoever that Eclipse is like 10x more dynamic & extensible than your Visual Studio. It's also built itself completely using plugins (even the core is a plugin), so startup time might take some seconds more (+ dynamic plugin loading at runtime). And you do realize that Eclipse does many things that Visual Studio doesn't, behind the scenes?

If a little slicker GUI is the meter of productivity for your, I feel sorry for you. Visual Studio is simply a joke compared to Eclipse nowadays when we are talking about REAL productivity. I can only imagine how things look a like few years from now on, considering how quickly Eclipse has gone past Visual Studio.

And if it flakes out or bogs down every 30 seconds, there's simply something wrong with your machine / configuration (most likely with Java).

Sorry, but you are a perfect example of how a bad carpenter blames his tools.

Err, Score:3, Interesting?

Re:Eclipse is a Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you don't know anything about Visual Studio's architecture, either. Heh, Eclipse is actually a pretty mediocre product to be honest. It's not the best Java IDE, and its plugins for other languages aren't even competitive. On top of that its performance is poor, and its default featureset is limited. The two of you talking smack about things neither of you really understand is impressive. Perhaps next time you can make more baseless comments about Eclipse and Visual Studio that make you seem detached from reality. Enjoy your real productivity, whatever that actually entails.

Re:Eclipse is a Joke

[Felonious Ham]

Heh, Eclipse is actually a pretty mediocre product to be honest.

I realize you're a troll, but this comment I just don't understand. I've used Eclipse daily since 2.0, and I can say it gets usefully better with each milestone. I haven't used VS since college, so it might be the dog's bollocks, but VS's goodness has nothing to do with Eclipse (other than perhaps providing some competition).

Eclipse has vibrant development community, that it's open source makes plugin development easy and rewarding. I don't know what you're running on that makes it slow, but I've haven't experienced "flaky" since 2.0 (with the exception of external plugins).

If you'd like to try an great plugin (in alpha) that does make Eclipse flaky and slow, but can make you more productive (if you work on large products) check out Mylar.

I'll never understand the weirdo hating that goes on on this site....

Re:Eclipse is a Joke

[Muramasa]

Why on earth would you want to use and IDE for PHP?

Re:Eclipse is a Joke

[bigdadro]

I'm using eclipse right now. I'v been using it to code java and coldfusion since the 2.0 days. 3.1 is rock solid and fast as hell. I Don't think you've really used it before!!!

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[zapadoo]

vim properly configured, is an excellent Python dev environment. Favorite feature? tags. Unfortunately, vim, properly configured, will take you weeks! But... its worth it.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[pthisis]

1. Change to the top directory of your Python project
2. find . -name '*.py' | ctags -L -
Tags now work.

Of course, even without that they'll work for some things (vim tries to make decent guesses if you don't have a tags file).

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[lannocc]

pthisis - You clearly have alot of experience working with VIM, and I am jealous! Where/how did you go about acquiring this knowledge? I have only been working with VIM (as my primary editor) for about a year now and continue to love it but I know I have only scratched the surface. I use console-mode vim more often than gvim so the menus don't mean much to me. Do you possibly know of some "tutorials" that delve into some of the deeper aspects of vim, specifically towards using it as an IDE like you apparently do?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Editor != IDE

[nurb432]

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 things .. im *not* knocking them as they have their place )

Re:Editor != IDE

[arkanes]

PyDev has all of that except for the GUI builder, which would depend on what graphical toolkit you're using.

Re:Editor != IDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you look at Komodo?

Re:Editor != IDE

[AELinuxGuy]

...and if you are looking for a GUI builder, GTK has a nice one:

http://glade.gnome.org/

Just associate the .glade files in Eclipse with Glade. Something really cool you can do with Python and Glade is use libglade (http://www.jamesh.id.au/software/libglade/) to dynamically generate your GUI from the .glade file.

Re:Editor != IDE

[Tuross]

I gave you a few of those before mentioning the other editors I also have installed more as a by-point (although they outnumbered the actual IDEs).
FWIW this machine also has VS.NET 2003 and VS.NET 2005, neither of which I really use since they both suck. In fact, I gave up using VisualPython (I participated in a trial version) because while it was nice, I couldn't stand Visual Studio.

Please take a look at SPE in particular which I think suits the requirements you have spoken of. I haven't had to do any GUI work in Eclipse but both PyDev and TruStudio are great for adding Python support (not just syntax highlighting, but the full complement of IDE features including code completion, macros, debugging support, class browsing, etc) to Eclipse. Eclipse itself has the PM and SCM support. It probably has GUI builder support as well, though as I said I haven't used it for any of that yet so I haven't checked it out; might be Java-only.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[vivek7006]

Could you please post your .vimrc file? Some of the stuff that you have mentioned will not work from a vanilla vim default setting

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[pthisis]

Oh, yeah, you could just click the little "build tags in the current directory" icon too if you want.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[pthisis]

Do you have a site I can upload to? It's about 3 python files and my vimrc to do most of the help/prototype display/class browser stuff (also I use the cvscommand and matchit plugins but no need to post them since they're widely available)

You need gvim with Python support, obviously.

Different Worlds

[echusarcana]

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.

Re:Different Worlds

[ardor]

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 integration for emacs exists.

Re:Different Worlds

[kabz]

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 debugging tool on a good OS, that can run plenty of Open Source stuff, you could do a lot worse than XCode (free) on OS X.

ActivePerl is OK, but...

[hummassa]

PXPerl is cooler :-)

No, that would be

[Anonymous Coward]

"nonvisual studio" and forth. An IDE with a black-on-black UI (for extra cool). It is of course impossible to see what's being done, so you have to type from memory, while simultaneously remembering forth's messy stack and what all the values on it mean.

Oh and the project you're coding is an embedded PIC chip with the code in PROM, they'll only burn them in identical multiples of 1000, and you'll be charged for any discards.

Happy hacking :-)

This should have been modded funny...

[rbarreira]

This should have been modded funny...

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[arkanes]

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 the long time user will have. On the other hand, VS absolutely has some features that no OSS editor/IDE/whatever can match, and for someone who hasn't spent 10 years memorizing keystrokes and customizing an emacs installtion, will absolutely be more productive.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Nataku564]

The perl plugin for Eclipse has done better for me than Emacs. Not that the Eclipse plugin really has any better features in the Emacs plugin, but Eclipse's integration with source control makes it worthwhile.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

But IDEs are just tools that make development so much quicker. They list all project files for easy opening, and keep them organized. They allow for compilation without having to write your own batch file. And - especially with VS.NET 2003 and 2005 - intellisense of some sort is simply inseperable from yours truely.

Fine. But we're talking about perl. A good text editor can provide easy access to project files, and no need to compile.

Re:They what? Oh....

[NutscrapeSucks]

Not to mention that ActivePerl talks COM, making it non-useless for system administration on Windows (most of the admin utilities are COM APIs).

Re:They what? Oh....

[fnsnet]

Yea, anyone that's coding in Perl or Python has enough knowhow to do it in the text editor of their choice anyway.. and are prob. using *nix anyhow. Matt

Re:They what? Oh....

[hellraizr]

I use pico you insensitive clod!

Re:They what? Oh....

[Forbman]

But wouldn't it be nice if they could do some work with the ICSharpDevelop team to add support for Perl and Python to SharpDevelop/MonoDevelop?

Some of the VisualStudio stuff they talk about not being able to Open Source is probably in the .Net Framework already, which SharpDevelop uses as much as they can.

Re:They what? Oh....

[smittyoneeach]

MinGW failed?

Use LEO (the Literate Editor) instead

[FFFish]

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.

Wing IDE

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wing IDE is the most advanced Python IDE available today. Wing's powerful debugging and code intelligence capabilities will turbo-charge your Python development. Wing supports web, GUI, and script development using Zope, Plone, mod_python, wxPython, PyQt, PyGtk, TkInter, and many other Python packages."

WingWare

Read the reviews:

A review of 6 Python IDEs

Re:Wing IDE

[mennucc1]

Truth is, WingIDE is a very nice program, costs a reasonable fee (at least, for me), and was quite effective when hacking in a large Zope related python project. It is not just "writing" code that matters, folks: it is "debugging" that makes the difference! All the posts about Vim and Emacs were missing this very important fact.
WindIDE ships with special sw hack that will enable you to debug into a running Zope, stop it, inspect variables, even inside your own Python Scripts. And, don't think that all non-Open-Source sw is out there to suck out your blood and soul: I originally bought the license for WindIDE 1, and they freely upgraded it to WingIDE 2; and they are very responsive at the support email.

Re:They what? Oh....

[CrazedWalrus]

Gads. Count me in, too. I saw ActiveState and Perl in the same sentence as "discontinuing". Missed the "Visual" bit.

I use both Active PERL and Python all the time for proof of concept code and quick CGIs on my desktop with Apache. It'd be a real shame if such a completely awesome (and typically unsung) tool were to go away.

*deep breath*

Phew. I'm okay now. Thanks for asking. :-)

Re:They what? Oh....

[CrazedWalrus]

Bah. pico is for n00bs. nano r0x0rz th3 planut!

(mods: this is a JOKE! :p)

Re:They what? Oh....

[sigloiv]

I thought the exact same thing. I also agree with you about what OS people use to develop on. I use Windows for gaming and a secondary computer running Gentoo to do all my programming (which I'm still learning...and with Nano, of course!)

Re:They what? Oh....

[Eil]

Yeah, I'm personally wondering why this "breaking news" appeared on the front page of Slashdot if nobody used the damn stuff...

Re:Eclipse works fine for Ruby too

[toby]

Semi-OT, but Eclipse also has a plugin to support Ruby development and many other languages (overview).

Re:They what? Oh....

[mnmn]

So why get angry? Perl is free as beer, and someone else will get us a win32 version fast.

Activestate's perl got me my current job. I did a data entry thingy in a short amount of time, then joined the IT team. Since then I've not used it ever, and I never paid for it. Somehow I feel secure about any OSS project and its future. Now if Opera was discontinued, I'd get angry.

Re:Excellent.. Who's next?

[EastCoastSurfer]

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 no problems writing standard c/c++ programs using the free express version.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[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.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[nikster]

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 Eclipse every day:

- I don't declare variables (ok in python you don't anyway), instead i write foo = obj.getFoo() and auto-fix it to declare it local or instance variable as desired.
- 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.
- Find all usages of a variable. Or all write to operations. Or all read operations on a variable.
- Remove variables that are not used. For example Eclipse marks all variables that are "never read". That means the variable is there, gets assigned to something but is then never used. Happens a lot with legacy code.
- Hover over methods / classes to see the docs
- Auto-complete that is smart. For example if I write
"Foo myFoo = obj." and then hit ctrl-space, it will list those methods that return an object of type Foo first. The same could be done for Python even though it's dynamically typed.
- rename methods/variables - the rename affects all code inside the project and even all code defined in dependent projects. What was once a huge and scary (will it work?) global search and replace operation is now a no-brainer. Which makes it MUCH more likely that things are named sensibly just because renaming is so easy. Rename also allows moving classes to new packages and so on - all automatically updated.
- Add / remove method parameters. Again, globally, all dependent code is automatically updated and I get to define a default value for add.
- See errors marked as I type. There is no compile button. Everything is compiled at all times, in the background. This is the way it should be, IMHO.
- Auto imports. Say you write a = ExternalObject() - Eclipse will automatically add that to the import statements. If it can't be found in the project scope but is in the project scope of another project in the workspace it will offer to add that other project to the dependencies and import the class. Basically I never waste a thought on import statements. I never even look at them unless there's a conflict (they are folded away)
- Mark several lines of code and extract a method from it.
- Tons of other things too of course.

I hear that IDEA and even VS.NET can do the same things. But all the others really need to take a good sharp look at these things and improve their IDEs. Yeah, XCode, that would be you. It's not 1995 anymore. Or 1975 for you Emacs guys. Emacs was very competitive for a long time mainly because there was no innovation in IDEs. That has changed now.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[pthisis]

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, extremely dynamic code like evaling random string in dynamic languages, or aliasing by void pointers, etc in weakly typed languages).

- Remove variables that are not used. For example Eclipse marks all variables that are "never read". That means the variable is there, gets assigned to something but is then never used. Happens a lot with legacy code.

Ditto, lint has done this for years (and all reasonable programmer's editors will integrate lint for you). Of course, even without lint gcc and other compilers have done this for over a decade.

- Hover over methods / classes to see the docs

I hit F1 (and the docs show when I'm typing as soon as I type the open parens after a function/class/method call). Hover would annoy me (I have all tooltips turned off) since I don't like things popping up randomly when I'm reading through code.

- Auto-complete that is smart. For example if I write
"Foo myFoo = obj." and then hit ctrl-space, it will list those methods that return an object of type Foo first. The same could be done for Python even though it's dynamically typed.

Like I said, the autocomplete is smart; if I type myfile., it only shows the methods of objects of the kind that myfile is a type of. I don't understand exactly how your example would work for Python, though, but in C++/Java vim will handle this no problem.

- rename methods/variables - the rename affects all code inside the project and even all code defined in dependent projects. What was once a huge and scary (will it work?) global search and replace operation is now a no-brainer. Which makes it MUCH more likely that things are named sensibly just because renaming is so easy. Rename also allows moving classes to new packages and so on - all automatically updated.

This is standard refactoring stuff. It's pretty new, but vi/emacs have handled it for several years (I use vim's BicycleRepairman interface for Python refactoring).

- Add / remove method parameters. Again, globally, all dependent code is automatically updated and I get to define a default value for add.

Ditto.

- See errors marked as I type. There is no compile button. Everything is compiled at all times, in the background. This is the way it should be, IMHO.

There's no compilation in Python, but I can lint on demand.

- Auto imports. Say you write a = ExternalObject() - Eclipse will automatically add that to the import statements. If it can't be found in the project scope but is in the project scope of another project in the workspace it will offer to add that other project to the dependencies and import the class. Basically I never waste a thought on import statements. I never even look at them unless there's a conflict (they are folded away)

This I don't have. Seems moderately nice.

- Mark several lines of code and extract a method from it.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

It's not 1995 anymore. Or 1975 for you Emacs guys.

A. Emacs wasn't around in 75
B. Emacs and vim have both improved steadily. If you last looked at vim 5 years ago, you're missing a lot and it's no more fair than me bringing up criticisms of ancient Eclipse versions.

Re:Eclipse works fine for Ruby too

[JeremyALogan]

You'd get mod points if I had them... I was about to ask this question. Thanks.

Komodo

[archeopterix]

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.

There are some bugs in Komodo for which I had to find workarounds: the only way to refresh the symbols database is to find and delete codeintel.db, the debugger usually hangs on symbol mouseover (not that I use it, it's just easy to incidentally leave the cursor over a symbol), and the whole app hangs about once a day for no particular reason, which I don't mind very much - reminds me not to miss a coffe break.

Re:They what? Oh....

[tigersha]

And vi is free as in syphilis

Re:How?

[SolitaryMan]

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.

Perl in Visual Studio -- quite good actually ...

[sjmac]

Wow, so many "Who needs an IDE?" posts, and so far only one other user of the plugins has posted. Maybe ActiveState are right -- not enough people use them. Is that a marketing problem rather than a product failure though? I think the Visual Studio Perl product is very impressive. I only bought them 4 months ago, but it's not like they are going to stop working.

I used to use Emacs, and thought that syntax highlighting and integrated debugging made an IDE. I coded up a few lisp macros, and ended up with a reasonable collection of "favourite modules". But I resented the time I needed to spend setting Emacs up each time I moved to a new machine, and even then, the app always felt out of place in whichever desktop I ran it in.

Then I spent a year writing .Net Web and Windows applications in VS .Net 2003. It really opended my eyes to how a good IDE helps speed up my development. Project and file templates take away a little setup; syntax checking "as you type" means I fix silly breaks right away, not in 30 minutes when I compile (or even later when I run, for Perl), which means the fix is more likely to be correct; code completion saves my fingers a little, and is a great way to learn about a libraries interface because all object methods are presented right in the context of where I'm trying to use them; help is integrated with the editor, for quick access to the documentation for any class or method; code browsing takes me right to the definition of any method or class in my project. As well as all that, the editor is a very pleasant place to work too.

OK, I could do some of that in Emacs, but in Visual Studio it's just there out of the box, with my prefered key-bindings as the default.

When I recently came back to a job that uses a lot of Perl and other script languages among it's C++ (for Windows and Solaris). I was really pleased that I could carry on using Visual Studio, and impressed with what ActiveState had done to integrate Perl within it (given that Perl is untyped!).

Syntax checking works by running some kind of perl process in the background. The debugger allows any variable, object accessor method, and attribute to be watched. Sensible templates and options are added to for Perl projects. (Careful, Visual Studio projects can lead to very deep module hierarchies!)

That's not to say that there aren't any rough bits -- the "as you type" Perl process crashes quite frequently (on my code, anyway) (but then restarts itself), and the help integration is a little light. I was looking forward to these being fixed in the VS2005 version (and I get a nicer editor that then too!)

That's not going to happen though :-( I've checked out Komodo (3.5.1), and at least the default key mappings are the same as VS! But I will stick with VS Perl Plugin for now, as I find the Perl debugger integration more reliable in VS!

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[jschrod]

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?

Perhaps Perl isn't the hype as it was anymore

[wysiwia]

During the time of Perl5 there was a lot of talking of surpassing C++ and about usable for everything. But it seems it didn't work out this way. For the hard core stuff and for a lot more C++ is still the only alternative. It doesn't matter much how good a language is, it matters how good the tools, the frameworks of a language are. For libraries and applications C++ still is the first address. Therefore it's understandable that the Visual-... got scrapped.

O. Wyss

Re:Excellent.. Who's next?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You're right that we don't use the STL for some of these projects. Unfortunately, our code has to be portable to a lot of platforms, and some of the more obscure ones still haven't caught up with the standard when it comes to templates and exceptions, which basically means we can't use them and have to resort to the kind of arcane hackery that was common a decade ago. It sucks, but it goes with the territory for that kind of work.

Regarding the recent versions of VS, it's one of those love-it-or-hate-it things.

I'll ignore VC++ 7.0, which had more bugs than a David Attenborough documentary.

Version 7.1 wasn't too bad, but it removed the browse toolbar, which was one of the most useful features of version 6. Also, it wasn't backward-compatible with some of the useful plug-ins for version 6, so using things like WndTabs was out. Builds took significantly longer than under version 6, which matters a lot for projects that already take minutes or hours to make. These IDE issues were enough for most of my colleagues to decide it wasn't worth the upgrade. More seriously than the IDE issues, the machine code it produced for floating point calculations did strange things at times, and it had some pretty fundamental bugs in the optimiser. The latter is kinda show-stopping, unless you like spending several days wading through assembly language to spot the time it lost track of how many values were on the FPU stack 10 functions up the call stack! :o)

The 2005 version would be a lot better -- if it worked. On about half the machines in our office, it has show-stopping IDE performance bugs (as in, the whole application goes into a trance for minutes at a time while messing around with the Intellisense data it now updates in the background). We haven't pinned down exactly when this does and doesn't happen yet, but it's certainly not restricted to older machines with low amounts of RAM as some Internet forum posts have suggested. Again, this alone was enough to get half the office to stick with an older version, or uninstall and revert. Then there's the performance of the generated floating point code, which since the beta seems to have dropped by a very significant margin (we've been talking about this amongst our development groups and with other contacts, and slow downs of as much as 50% have been reported). There is obviously something seriously wrong with the FP code generation/optimisation, and this is a clear show-stopper if you write mathematical code. Then there's the fact that the much-vaunted Intellisense doesn't always work: in some ways, it's much nicer (for example, handling of macros -- which we use extensively because we can't use templates -- is much better) but then you load up the debugger, try to hop up the call stack from a breakpoint, and get silly messages about the code in the source file not matching the compiled code -- which it just built from that source file 10 seconds ago. Some of the browse info lost after version 6 has made a welcome return in 2005, but it's still not as useful as the simple-but-effective tools that were there before.

The jury here is out on 2005 at the moment. Right now, we have about 80% of staff who've tried it reverting to older versions. Given that the performance issues with both the IDE and the generated FP code are pretty severe and pretty obvious, and that by the MS dev team's own admission in some of their blogs the product was released before it was really ready, we're expecting some sort of service pack will appear early next year. If that fixes up the major issues, 2005 should be much better than version 6 was. Otherwise, since we really couldn't care less about .Net or intricate template support but we do need solid basic code optimisation and reliable floating point math, we'll relegate 2005 to a "build the code for customers who want it, otherwise ignore it" role, just as we did with the last two versions.

Boa Constructor

[nurb432]

Boa Constructor fell under my classification as not being stable enough for production use.

Crimson Editor

[RosenSama]

Crimson Editor is nice and free, but not FSF free.

Re:They what? Oh....

[dorkygeek]

Lamer! ed rulez 411 th3 w4y.

GVim

[foolish_to_be_here]

Don't forget GVim. At least that is the editor of choice for me. What does Emacs offer that GVim doesn't?

Re:GVim

[Just Some Guy]

A different way of doing things. I prefer the Emacs way, although I know the Vim well enough to do what needs to be done if Emacs isn't available.

Re:They what? Oh....

[indifferent children]

And vi is free as in syphilis

And like syphilis: vi has been around for a very long time, is very 'successful' at developing a wide user base, and has the potential to drive you crazy. That being said, it's still my favorite editor!

Re:Excellent.. Who's next?

[master_p]

I too like VS6 better than VS7 because VS6 is faster and simpler than VS7. Eclipse is a tremendous open-source effort, but it has a bad interface that I have difficulty to adjust to: little buttons everywhere and in various configurations, wrong and confusing terminology, difficult-to-access project configuration screens etc.

Just downloaded Komodo upon this article

[Qbertino]

I've allways liked ActiveState and their suckage free aproach of bundling OSS with their commercial tools. On and off I've been looking for a fast, native IDE for mentioned languages that runs on OS X. Nice to see Komodo offers that. I DLd the Tryout and am testing it just now. While it does look quite complete and the documentation appears to be top-of-the-line I must say that I'm obviously pampered by jEdit's extensive features and expandability - even though it 'only' runs on Java.

Code color highlighting is much more customizable, whitespace coloring can be changed, at least three folding modes instead of just one, bracket-scope highlighting (I think jEdit is the only one to have this) and countless other things make jEdit an Editor/IDE that appears to be hard to beat. I'll do some more extensive testing with Komodo but I presume I'm going to continue using jEdit.

Re:They what? Oh....

[Anonymous Coward]

The native Win32 version does not suffer from any of the issues the Cygwin port has; it's a real Windows program, so you get real Windows paths and so on. It can even look for things like perl5lib in the Registry, if you're into that sort of thing.

Um, what? The Cygwin version recognises Windows paths too - but has the advantage that it also recognises Unix paths. The Cygwin version has access to the registry too. And last time I checked, the native Windows version had problems with CPAN. That works fine in the Cygwin version.

The one sole only advantage I know of with the Windows version is that it's faster. But if you care about speed, you won't be using a treacle-slow language like Perl anyway.

VSE alll the way

[beforewisdom]

Since I started using Visual Slick Edit ( not free ) years ago I never needed or wanted another IDE. It does it all and I've only had to learn one interface.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[famebait]

Eclipse/Java. This is the state of the art.

I like Eclipse, but the people I know who have used both it and IDEA seriously all say that Eclipse is clunky by compariason. And I don't find it very hard to believe. While Eclipse/Java has lots of nice stuff, a lot of it could be made way more accessible and streamlined (usability-wise).

Visual Studio with C# is also catching up fast, and will probably surpass them all soon, given the rate of improvement there recently, and the kind of people Microsoft has working on their development tools. In some areas it is already more elegant in its interactions.
Be sure to compare any java IDE to VS/C# or J#, not VS/C++, which is a much more challenging language to support in the same way.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Yes, emacs saves me lots of typing. It's so convenient - instead of having to type out long class and method names like "foobar.query_frobnicate", all I have to do is type "fo", then press C-X-automatically-complete-this-class-name and hit enter, and it fills in the "oobar" bit automatically!

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[IAmTheDave]

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 take the 10 days it takes to get aquainted with VI to get aquainted with VI.) I spent time coding ASP in variations of notepad or enhanced notepad applications. I had moderate code completion, syntax highlighting, the works.

I speak from a whole lot of experience here. Emacs and VIM are simply outdated in their ability to match the speed/enhancements of a modern IDE. I'm sorry I'm putting your baby down here, but getting so emotional about emacs is a bit over the top, and shows that zealotry cannot be combatted, no matter how rational the argument.

Python IDEs and GUI builders

[Kagami001]

I'm currently evaluating Python IDEs at the moment myself, starting with Wing IDE Professional, and while I don't have any conclusions yet, I can list what the current state of the market looks like.

Black Adder, has a "GUI designer with all the features of Qt Designer and generates Python and Ruby code." I can't seem to find pricing information on their website at the moment; I'm guessing the "Cannot connect to database server error" text is where an add-to-cart button is supposed to be. Their license is proprietary and the product is not free for redistribution, but source code is included.

SPE - Stani's Python Editor features the wxGlade GUI designer as a plugin. Open source, GPL license.

Komodo Professional (US$295) has a GUI builder that uses Tkinter. (There's a $29.95 "Personal" edition, but that lacks the GUI builder and is restricted to non-commercial use, where "non-commercial use is defined as tasks for which you are not paid. If you are using Komodo as part of your job, you must purchase Komodo Professional.")

One can also combine using Qt Designer (licensed together with Qt; both GPL and proprietary license options available) with one of the above or with Wing IDE Professional (US$179) or PyDev (Eclipse Public License) which both look promising. Wing IDE Professional includes source code, though like Komodo, it is not free to distribute. (There's also a $30 Wing IDE Personal edition, but it's missing a number of key features from Professional that I would think just about any Python programmer would want, even for hobby use, so I don't really consider it an option. It also has a "non-commercial use" restriction, like Komodo.)

Just guessing...

[hackwrench]

http://www.flos-freeware.ch/metapath.html Metapath was written to integrate with Metapad but works with other things. I thought that maybe the plugin might be similar.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Bob Uhl]

Not that the Eclipse plugin really has any better features in the Emacs plugin, but Eclipse's integration with source control makes it worthwhile.

You do know that emacs integrates with source control as well, right? CVS, RCS & SCCS out of the box, but there are modes to support other systems too. C-x v v checks in a file; C-x v = diffs the current version against the checked-in version; C-x v d does a directory-editing version control mode and so forth.

The really great thing about emacs is that it does just about everything. The really bad thing is that one really has to read the entire manual, and the web sites, and the discussion groups, to know how to get it to do everything...

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Bob Uhl]

emacs was an IDE before there were IDEs. With SLIME, I can type the beginning of a function name, then tab and it completes; it then displays a template with the functions arguments; M-. will take me to that function's definition--the exact same for macros. I don't think you fully realise what the phrase 'emacs is an extensible text editor' implies; it implies that emacs can do everything any other IDE can do--and it's been around long enough that it probably already does, since almost certainly someone else has wanted to do it.

Re:They what? Oh....

[El_Servas]

Ok. I know i'm going to get bashed for this one... but what the hell... my mom told me to always ask something you don't know (And to RTFM too). So...

What is the editor the guy in the Ruby on rails uses in his screencasts?

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Bob Uhl]

Perhaps you didn't learn to use emacs effectively? I've been using it full-time for three or four years, but first played with it 14 years ago, and it's only now that I'm beginning to really grok and extend it. The emacs wiki is an invaluable resource. Remember, emacs is written in (a) Lisp, and Lisp is the most powerful of programming languages. If you want a feature emacs doesn't have, it can be added; there's no feature which can't be added. But most any feature one could want has already been added, by someone; all you have to do is find it and use it.

I'm constantly discovering new features in emacs which I'd never even thought of before. If you were just using it as a glorified Notepad, then you weren't using it to its full potential--not nearly.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[IAmTheDave]

Perhaps you didn't learn to use emacs effectively? I've been using it full-time for three or four years, but first played with it 14 years ago, and it's only now that I'm beginning to really grok and extend it.

This is, in my opinion, one of emacs/vim's greatest detractions. With VS.NET and the like, most of the features I want/need are there, right out of the box. I can remember trying to extend emacs for the first time to get syntax highlighting in my Java code, and getting quite frustrated until someone helped me out. Sure, I was just learning at the time, but it shouldn't be that difficult.

Remember, emacs is written in (a) Lisp, and Lisp is the most powerful of programming languages.

Um, I'm gonna leave that alone. This is one of those "best for the required solution" arguments.

If you want a feature emacs doesn't have, it can be added; there's no feature which can't be added.

Same with VS.NET. Even more so with the likes of Eclipse. This is not unique to emacs, I just find the implementation more difficult. I had a friend who wanted to be able to embed WMP in the IDE, so he could play music without having to switch out of the IDE. Took me 10 minutes to write up a plugin that sat in the sidebar of VS.NET and embedded WMP. Of course emacs is extensible, it just seems more difficult, to me.

I'm not trying to put down emacs users. I'm also not trying to imply that those who still use it are either missing out or are not good programmers. I'm just trying to imply that things will continue to get better as time goes on, and for me, modern IDEs are just a lot better for the code I do than emacs/vim will ever be.

Re:Visual-Studio is a great IDE, Visual-Python = g

[Kenbo]

I've been using PythonWin for a couple of years for windows python development. I like it but I find it crashes and fubar's windows alot when I'm doing compute or io intensive projects.

There's a list of editors at the python wiki site http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEditors/ but no indication of which ones are actively developed.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Bob Uhl]

With VS.NET and the like, most of the features I want/need are there, right out of the box.

That's also true of emacs; almost all features are already there. My point was that if perchance a desired feature isn't already implemented, then it's normally pretty easy to do so for oneself. Now, reading the manual is necessary, but that shouldn't really be an issue.

And you really oughtn't put vi and emacs in the same sentence. One is a text editor; the other is something rather more.

As for playing music in the IDE, emacs already has this: EMMS is the emacs multimedia system. The version I have is less than 5K lines of code (including whitespace & comments--it's just the output of wc -l), which includes several non-essential bits; the core is less than 2KLOC.

What About X-Chat?

[TheoMurpse]

I guess that means there won't be any further development on the Python and Perl modules for X-Chat for Windows. X-Chat requires ActivePerl and ActivePython to run Perl and Python plugins for the program.

Well, the Python plugin has been stuck at requiring ActivePython 2.3 for a while now, so maybe they'll just leave it at that.

Re:What About X-Chat?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're discontinuing VisualPerl and VisualPython (the Visual Studio IDE plugins), not ActivePerl and ActivePython (the language packages).

If they developed a Eclipse plug-in

[cylcyl]

As opposed to a VS plug-in, the demand would have been greater and they would have cross-platform capabilities

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Nataku564]

We use Visual Source Safe at work. Yes, its horrid, I hate it, and I lobby against it every chance I get.

Eclipse also has really nice source tree browsing through CVS and a small host of other nice features that emacs integration lacks. I have used Emacs with CVS before, and it works, but its nice to use the shiny GUI for big projects.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[drgonzo59]

Lisp is the most powerful of programming languages.

If the language is Turing complete it is equally powerful to C, Java, Python, machine code and, oh the horror! - even to Visual Basic and most others.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[drgonzo59]

I use Netbeans for Java. I think in its latest incarnation it caught up with Eclipse in terms of refactoring and code completion, but I mostly use its Swing UI builder to make GUIs.

As far as Emacs, there is still something about it that people like. Once you learn (customize) the key bindings writing code is really fast when you don't have to touch the mouse and just keep your fingers on the main part of the keyboard.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Bob Uhl]

Remember what Turing-complete means: it means 'equivalent to a Turing machine.' Have you ever written a Turing machine? Have you ever written assembler? Turing-completeness merely indicates that a certain class of problems are calculable; it says nothing about how easy it is to calculate them, how long it will take or how avoidable errors are. That's what I mean when I write 'powerful.'

If Turing-completeness were all that matters, why would we bother having more than one language? After all, a one-instruction-set-computer can calculate anything too; it just takes a Very Long Time.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[Bob Uhl]

A quick Googling reveals several apparent ways to deal with SourceSafe from within emacs; I don't use it myself, so I cannot evaluate them. It's possible that they work well out of the box, or that they are incomplete, or that they would require server-side changes--or worst of all, site-wide policy changes.

Emacs version control has a directory browsing feature for CVS too: C-x v d. By default it displays only the modified files, but v t will toggle this, and there's a variable to control it as well.

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[vivek7006]

please email me the files at vivek7006 AT YAHOO DOT COM

Thanks for your help

Re:Visual Studio? Is that like an Emacs mode?

[foxed]

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.

Studio *6* had both these features. From what you say it's taken vim eight years to catch up.

outdated by IDEs?!

[namekuseijin]

"Emacs and VIM are simply outdated in their ability to match the speed/enhancements of a modern IDE."

This is so fucking plain wrong i don't know how to start.

First off: IDEs are a concept from commercial environments like Windows and Macs. For a very simple reason: such environments come with nothing at all for you to do software development. No compilers, no interpreters, no decent command-line interpreter, no debuggers, no web servers, no DBMSs, no decent text editor...

Notepad?! Come on! I'm a software developer, not some news reporter from the 40s or some housewive with free time in my hands to cook...

The reason Unix don't need an IDE is simple, too: it is an Integrated Development Environment, by itself! From the shell, you edit source code, you built Makefiles, you write simple support scripts, you compile, you debug, you list the files in your project etc etc etc... it comes fully loaded with software development goodies.

Today you have some pretty hot IDEs, like Eclipse. They are huge monsters that draw all your computing resources just so that you can feel they are trully powerful. I bet someday they'll be so powerful as to not even need programmers: just describe what you need, and they'll automagically make it done.

Don't get me wrong: i feel Eclipse's refactoring tools to be pretty nice. Not something impossible to be done in emacs-lisp or in vim scripts, but nice anyway.

The problem i see, though, is this: all IDEs i've met ( Delphi, VS and Eclipse ) suck so badly at the text editing itself, that sometimes i feel i'd be better off by just editing in emacs or vim anyway. Vim's extreme ease to go forward and backwards in your jump list history alone would suffice for the change. Simple word completion is also way, way faster than the heavy semantic completion ( Intellisense or whatever other bs M$ marketeers can come about ). It's also, in some 80% of the cases, the effective choice. Don't even ask me about sentence/paragraph ( blocks ) selection and moving through the text: these simply don't exist in IDEs...

Of course, since the text editing component sucks so much, IDEs try to compensate by having such features as class browsers ( a quick listing of all the methods and other declarations in a class ) and the like. So, you can move your hand away from the keyboard, reach for the mouse, scroll down, select an appropriate entry and go there. Somehow, i don't believe it would be so much trouble in vim or emacs...

so, don't make me laugh.