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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..."
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.
Start a happiness pandemic
Besides as long as there's Emacs for Windows, I can't imagine wanting to use anything else for Unix-origin languages.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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
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.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
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...
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
*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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
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?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power