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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.
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.
I've been working with Erlang for about 9 months now. It's an interesting language, but prone to some of the most bizarre runtime problems because it doesn't do type checking (for example if you typo a "+" instead of "++" when concatenating strings it'll defer the error to runtime, when it reports an "arith error".)
One thing that really impresses me about Erlang is how tight the code is. We've been working on a PBX application (with Freeswitch and PostgreSQL) and it's not even 30,000 lines of code in Erlang, including database I/Os and client/server GUI access. C++ would have weighed in at around 100,000 lines for the same functionality.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When your project size starts getting large and the number of classes/functions/types/etc starts heading to the thousands its pretty nice to have something that will quickly show you the organization of the code base and help you find things faster. Stuff like "I'm in a source file, open the corresponding header" or "show me all the places that call this function" or "rename this function everywhere it was used" or even "let me browse through the 10 versions of the function to see the right one without having to load the header file and stare at it". Also, when there's tight checkout integration its nice to click on another file, check it out, etc. without having to drop to the command line or move to something else. That's not to say that the command line isn't useful - I still find it easier to sometimes run makes or grep or whatever so there's always one handy, but personally I get a lot more done than with a plain old editor.
I use IDE as a tool.
The problem is some people use it as a crutch... "If the IDE doesn't handle it then it cant be done" mindset
But it is a tool to keep in your cap. I know Visual Studio 2008 is good at showing me methods and properties I can access from the variables which is handy to let you know what is going on in a datatype/class you don't use much.
However sometime I will take the file out of Visual Studios to do some additional coding because Visual Studios Expects you to code in Top Down in this order...
IF (x == y)
{
msgbox("hello");
}
However real life has it more like this...
msgbox("hello");
run test...
Up arrow Return
if (x == y) {
return down arrow to go past the msgbox command
}
For this case the IDE is a pain because it will try to close my if statments {} which if I am not paying attention it will give me an extra } that I need to dig around and find when I get a compile error.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Eclipse might be better than VS, but I've never been able to get it to run fast enough to be usable.
Last time I installed it the person advocating it to me looked over my shoulder and said "yeah, I think you need to upgrade your video drivers".
How we know is more important than what we know.
If no one ever reinvented the wheel, we'd all be running around on stone wheels.
I really hate Eclipse actually. I find it buggy, slow, and non-intuitive in a lot of ways. For Java stuff, IntelliJ IDEA is really great. For non-MS C and C++...I'm not really sure anymore. I mostly end up using Vim and the command line.