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.

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.

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: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?