in reply to Professional Toolkits <=> vim + shell

Just out of curiosity, how much experience do you have with full-featured IDEs? The reason Perl doesn't have much in the way of decent IDEs is that Perl really doesn't support them terribly well. It's introspective capabilities are really poor, it's very difficult to parse, you can't infer method or function signatures, the standard testing packages only allow primitive hooks and the debugger is a nightmare (though Devel-ebug seems like a step in the right direction).

For these and other reasons, IDEs for Perl tend to be limited in scope. A good IDE can speed development quite nicely at the cost of the programmer not memorizing many things quickly. Frankly, I don't want to need to memorize all of the methods DBI uses to fetch results, but instead I need to keep popping open perldoc to remember exactly what I want. A good IDE makes that available in a couple of keystrokes.

You might be happy with vim + shell + perldoc, but for many Perl developers, they have to be happy with that because that's all they have. It's almost like Guido suggesting closures aren't valuable because Python doesn't support 'em :) (yeah, that's a cheap and somewhat inaccurate shot)

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

  • Comment on Re: Professional Toolkits <=> vim + shell

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Professional Toolkits <=> vim + shell
by codeacrobat (Chaplain) on Apr 06, 2006 at 07:02 UTC
    I have done some projects with
  • Eclipse, JBuilder (Java)
  • Visual Studio (C#)
  • Visual Basic
  • They are all terribly nice, powerful and essential for their supported languages. I agree that it makes
    sense to switch to an IDE for DBI and other swiss army knife modules.
    I mainly use Perl for short scripts, that require/use modules, that I know good enough.
    There I would soon be annoyed of all the clicking together of commandline arguments.
    I was just curious how far IDE-development with perl has gone and under which circumstances one should dump vim+bash.
Re^2: Professional Toolkits <=> vim + shell
by idsfa (Vicar) on Apr 06, 2006 at 16:04 UTC

    Just FYI, EPIC now does code completion on module methods and has hooks for debugging and perldoc. In case you wanted to try it out again and see if it really saves you those keystrokes ...


    The intelligent reader will judge for himself. Without examining the facts fully and fairly, there is no way of knowing whether vox populi is really vox dei, or merely vox asinorum. — Cyrus H. Gordon