ActiveState have an integrated development environment (IDE) named Komodo. This may be of interest to you. It runs on Windows, Mac and various flavours of Linux.

Perl Development Tools

• Is there an IDE or Windows Perl Editor? (from perlfaq3)
• What's the best Perl IDE?

Well, it kinda depends, doesn't it?

If you're talking about code, then yes I agree 100% that it doesn't make very much sense.

But if we're talking about drag-n-drop to build a GUI, it makes very much sense to use a visual tool to define a visual thing (e.g. a dialog box, or an application window) instead of fiddling around with snippets of code to build it.

Perhaps the most important distinction between the two would be to say that the GUI builder is declarative, and the manual code way of building a GUI is imperative. I think that's important.

That kind of thinking could also be brought back to the original question of drag-n-drop coding. While it may be inherently bad to do this for imperative coding, maybe it works better for a declarative style?

Thoughts?

/J

When you use those top-of-the-line VC++ gui builders, where a right-click on a widget brings up a submenu listing EVERY attribute of the widget, (from bindings, callbacks, colors, etc), the GUI-builder can be very effective. BUT.... all the free ones(and most opensource) I see have very limited sub-menus. I suppose eventually we will get one that is cheap, widely available, and works on all platforms. We all dream of such a programming tool, but it is still elusive. I won't pay to find out either, they all promise alot of features, but when you get to the nitty gritty, they disappoint. ;-) One or two month trial periods is not enough. Who is going to devote a month full time to testing a gui builder, knowing you have to pay if you don't decide fast enough.

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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum

what about you think about having a tool to help u to writing a perl scripts , itis a good deal huh . tool meaning is some thing like a NetBeans for Java which make things easier making drag and drop and make the life easier .

Well, I guess that's the difference between opening a can of chili and serving it cold with some tired white bread toast and flat ginger ale on one hand, and on the other hand, mincing garlic and chopping onion by hand, throwing it onto some hot olive oil and following it with some fresh ground beef, sprinkling on some spices, some red wine and of course some hot sauce for flavouring, letting the whole mixture stew for an hour or two, adding some tomato paste, some kidney beans and perhaps some rich bouillon, letting it cook down a bit, maybe thicken up some, while you broil some sourdough bread, spread it with some real butter and serve hot with some icy cold beer.

Opening a can of something isn't the same as cooking something from scratch. I cook stuff from scratch, and that's the way I write a lot of my code too, unless you count all of the goodness that I get from CPAN -- but those guys are real chefs, and their recipes are well-tested by constant use.

A GUI is fine when you're learning, but I consider that kind of stuff training wheels. To get real work done, you gotta get down to the command line, to the raw ingredients. Really.

I'm immediately drawn to this argument about both food and code. Who wouldn't rather have home cooking than canned food?

But, on reflection I have to consider what is "scratch" cooking. Is a pie still made from scratch if I buy a crust and only make the filling? What about if I buy flour already ground? Would it only be from scratch if I bought wheat instead (or grew it myself for ultimate freshness)?

In programming, I don't ultimately like scratch much, if it means assembly or even C. Perl has a lot of benefits. But, it does diminish my understanding, since I've never written a regex engine and I haven't implemented a hash since college. I'm willing to let others do those things.

The history of programming (more so than the history of cooking) is about moving the definition of scratch up the stack. And so it is for the OP and previous commentators. While I don't use an IDE myself (and I insist that a language is too complex, if you must use one to write in it), I don't disparage those who do. Why shouldn't we endorse commoditization of common tasks? That is really our whole history.

Phil

The Gantry Web Framework Book is now available.

All things in moderation, including moderation. (Author unknown.)

I consider myself very lucky to have developed software using assembler (a bit-slice processor in the late 70's, the 6809, x86 and 68000 in the 80's and 90's), then C (late 70's to the late 90's) and finally Perl (late 90's until now). I don't need to build my own hardware or write my own assembler or compiler, but I know enough about doing those things that I appreciate what's going on underneath. So by all means build on the work that others have done before you, as long as you appreciate the history that has gone before you.

And I have made my own pastry and pizza dough, from scratch -- yes, it's a little more work, but it's worth it if you have the time. And when time is short, it's fine to use a good quality prepared ingredient. Just as long as you have a deep understanding of what the meal (or the code) is made from.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

I've actually found most visual programming environments both counter-intuitive (maybe because I'm from the Right Coast, and the visual environments all seem to come from the Left Coast) and counter-productive. Of course, whether visual environments enhance or impair productivity depends quite a lot on what sort of programming one does, and how large and complex the project is. I suspect that visual environments work best on fairly small-scale ("small" is less than about 50,000 significant lines of code) projects which are neither computationally complex , i.e., n-body simulations (see The Art of Computational Science), numerical relativity, global climate modeling, etc, nor require very high performance and auditing standards, such as flight control software.

One thing I tend to find very frustrating about most visual environments is that the accompanying documentation tends to leave a lot to be desired.