Something For (Almost) Every Developer

First up, reader martinjlogan sends along a tutorial for setting up a workable Erlang/OTP development environment on a Mac. Next, reader acid06 notes news of Perl 5.12, including what may be the first delivered fix for the Y2K38 bug. (Hit the Read More link below for some details on Perl's new release strategy.) "After two years of development, the new major version of Perl is now available. Notable new features are: better Unicode support, proper support for time after the Y2038 barrier, new APIs to allow developers to extend Perl with 'pluggable' keywords and syntax, warnings for deprecated features and more. From the linked post: You can get it from the CPAN right now or wait for a platform-specific release (such as Strawberry Perl for Windows)." Finally, from reader snydeq: "InfoWorld's Martin Heller provides an in-depth review of Visual Studio 2010 and finds Microsoft taking several large steps away from its legacy IDE code. 'Visual Studio 2010 is a major upgrade in functionality and capability from its predecessor. Developers, architects, and testers will all find areas where the new version makes their jobs easier. Despite the higher pricing for this version, most serious Microsoft-oriented shops will upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 and never look back,' Heller writes. Chief among the improvements are Microsoft's revamping the core editing and designer views to use WPF, its overhaul of IntelliSense and support for test-driven development, and its intelligent support for multiple versions of the .Net Framework."
Re: Perl. This release cycle marks a change to a time-based release process. Beginning with version 5.11.0, we make a new development release of Perl available on the 20th of each month. Each spring, we will release a new stable version of Perl. One month later, we will make a minor update to deal with any issues discovered after the initial ".0" release. Future releases in the stable series will follow quarterly. In contrast to releases of Perl, maintenance releases will contain fixes for issues discovered after the .0 release, but will not include new features or behavior.

Comments

Re:VS upgrade cycle

[AndrewStephens]

Agreed. I work in a "serious Microsoft shop" and we have just migrated our projects to VS2008. Experience has taught us that although the Microsoft Dev environments are of high quality, for the first 12 months there will be service packs and patches. We do not want to have to migrate our whole team and our projects every 3 months just to keep up.

That said, I am looking forward to using VS2010 eventually. I couldn't care less about .NET but the new C++ language features are neat.

Re:Stereotyping?

[FooAtWFU]

Well, almost every Unix developer uses Perl for glue code, and almost every Microsoft developer will use VS2010, and if you're programming a Mac, I don't see how you could be sufficiently non-erudite to use anything but Erlang.

Strawberry Perl will be out in a week or so

[adamkennedy]

Strawberry Perl has been doing betas all the way through the 5.12.0 RC process, so the production release should be out in a week or so.

What the summary doesn't mention is that there's some stuff in 5.12 that allows Strawberry to add:

GCC-based 64-bit support for Windows servers

Strawberry Portable (flash drive) stuff finally works in a first-class manner (with separate core/vendor/site installation targets).

Re:Strawberry Perl will be out in a week or so

[Phroggy]

In contrast to ActiveState's ActivePerl (a Windows port of Perl, sponsored by Microsoft, which works well but changes things enough that you generally can't just download some random CPAN module and compile it, you have to use one of the precompiled binary modules they make available), Strawberry Perl is a Windows port of Perl that tries to remain as close as possible to the original UNIX version, but tweaking just enough to get it to work well on the platform. I believe the goal is to move toward Vanilla Perl, which would be essentially taking the plain old normal Perl that runs on UNIX, and just running that on Windows without changing anything.

Re:VS upgrade cycle

[yuriks]

Actually, one of the features of 2010 is that you can target old compiler versions (starting with VS2008) with the new IDE.

What, no ActiveState mention?

[Anonymous Coward]

While you're waiting for Strawberry Perl to put out a release, why not try a package from a company that has their stuff together? Activestate's ActivePerl 5.12.0 is free-for-non-commercial-use and already out. 32- and 64-bit builds for Windows, Mac, and select Linux distros are available.

Re:Perl 5.12?

[mr_mischief]

Perl 6 is mainly usable, and some form of it is being used in production at multiple sites. It's just not ready for public "launch" yet. If you really want it, you can get it. Perl6.org has it.

Perl 5 hasn't exactly been sitting still the past decade. The changes between 5.6 and 5.8 or 5.8 and 5.10 are huge. I haven't looked over the full changes list for 5.12 yet, but it sure isn't the language Perl 5 was in 2000.

no brainer?

[thoughtsatthemoment]

I've been using VC++ Express 2008 and was excited to get an upgrade. But instead I was surprised by a few seemingly "dumb" moves:

1. The default fonts for the editor and tool windows have been changed to a font that looks very blurry on Windows XP. To change them back, you have to change them one by one for every window.

2. The drag'n Drop capability to add buttons to the tool bars is gone. You have to find the button from another dialog and then click "MoveUp/Down" several times to move it to the place you want.

3. The GUI I used the most in the Option Dialog, the directories of Exe/Include/Lib, is moved to a place that I haven't yet found.

4. The startup time is much longer than that of 2008.

5. The new GUI has a high contrast. Maybe it's just me, but after staring at it for a long time, I feel like I am starting to see ghost images.

Is VS2010 still slow?

[MrCrassic]

A few days ago, I used a copy of Visual Studio 2010 that I got from my MSDN Academic Alliance account. It looks really nice, but it ran absolutely dog slow. And this was for debugging VBScript!

I gave it another shot with Visual Studio 2010 Web Developer Express, which I heard can debug VBScript just like the full devenv can. It was a little faster (though still slower than VS2008), but it nor Visual Basic 2010 Express would debug my VBScript.

I haven't tried coding on it for real (I also do C/C++ development; can't wait to port that script over to a REAL effin' language), but if it's as slow as I remember it being, I can see lots of companies turning back really quickly.