I recently read over at ActiveState's site that they are joining Micro$oft Visual Studio Integration Program(?) by teaming up with them to produce the Visual Perl and Visual Python applications for Visual Studio release 7. Me thinks that an embracement of this caliber comes in good timing. While there are many IT managers out there saying that Java will kill (take your pick) Perl, C, Ada, etc, it sounds like a step foward towards having perl accepted as the heavy-duty-all-purpose-glue language that it is.

Embracing is fine. Its the extending part that makes me worry. I've always thought that perl needs a good and solid IDE. But will MS be able to produce one? Even if they do, what kind of power will they have to corrupt the core of the language? Remeber what they did with Visual J++, adding their own stuff in as if it were part of Sun's original distribution?

So far, either MS is keeping this a big secret, or they just don't care that much, since I tried searching their site for more info and came up with zip. Does anyone know more about this?

In reply to Visual Perl & ActiveState by BBQ

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