Random Perl ... rant

[Jonathan Rockway]

* On Thu, Apr 03 2008, Johan Lindström wrote:
> Just for the record, Emacs has a unified debugger mode, and the perldb
> blends in beautifully with that. I.e. you step through the code in the
> editor and you have a REPL next to it for inspection and all that
> stuff.

Speaking of REPLs, here's my take:

http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Stylish%20REPL.pod

Yes, a video is included.

Anyway, Stylish has some of the same goals of Perlysense, but since I
run everything in a server I took a few metaprogramming liberties that
would make the command-line script version too slow to start up.
Commands can be dynamically added to the server, the REPL can have
plugins dynamically loaded, etc.

The eventual goal is to use the Swank protocol, so SLIME can be used on
Perl as well as LISP.  After that, SLIME will be ported to other
editors, and Stylish to other languages.

Then we can have all the neat SLIME features without being locked in to
a language or editor, which is the way I think tools should work.
Lock-in sucks.  (And yes, I realize that Perl users are locked in to
Perl because of the CPAN.  I'm going to fix that next.)

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway

-- 
print just => another => perl => hacker => if $,=$"