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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
Visual Studio??? + Perl???
Isn't that what bad software engineers are forced to use for eternity in Hell?
Yeeeechhh!!!
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..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
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!
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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.
Back to vi/Notepad/Komodo, then..
Uh, back to? Personally, I never left.
hi mom!
... or use notepad++, which kicks ass.
Information is a process.
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.
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
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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
*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.
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.
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: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.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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
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The moon may be smaller than Earth, but it's further away.
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
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.