Better Perl

[Randy J. Ray]

> I'm not sure who this is aimed at. It's clear that there are at least
> two groups of people (the groups behind Komodo and EPIC) who agree that
> and IDE is needed. So rather than telling the people on this list (who
> largely, it would seem, don't share that point of view) that an IDE is
> essential, your time might be better spent contacting those groups and
> discussing with them the improvements that you think their IDEs need.
> 
> Or maybe even getting involved with the development of those tools. You
> know, this _is_ open source software. "Patches welcome" and all that :-)

I'm one of the odd ones who believes that a good IDE with stress on the "I"
(integrated) part would go a long ways towards making Perl less daunting to
new-comers.

I've been an Eclipse user (mostly for non-Perl projects) for many years, and
have hoped time and time again that EPIC would mature, but it seems to be
coming along as slowly as perl6. I had hoped that the PPI modules might prove a
strong basis for something like EPIC to build on, but that hasn't happened either.

I can say this, though it should *not* be seen as a promise to the community:
my current employer has a *very* strong commitment to contributing back to the
F/OSS community. Early on (I say that as though I haven't only been there two
weeks thus far) it was made clear to me that anything we come up with that
isn't core business-critical intelligence, we should look at from the vantage
point of whether it would make a suitable CPAN contribution. And, on top of
that, my manager is a fan of Eclipse and would like to see EPIC mature. What it
needs is someone who's not biased against Java, and has worked on Eclipse
plugins in the past. So we're hoping that in the near future, I might be able
to apportion some part of my time on that. Like I said, this isn't a promise,
more of an optimistic plan at this stage. (On the plus side, I got my
grand-boss to agree to send me to OSCON as part of my overall employment
package. They *are* serious about this stuff.)

I also agree that better support for Windows (and Mac) is key. Having just been
handed my first Macbook Pro for this job, it wasn't exactly intuitive how to
get going with CPAN modules. Fortunately, I have enought Mac-using Perl folks
following my Twitter stream that I got all the answers I needed as fast (or
faster) than email would have provided. but if it doesn't already exist,
something like macosx.perl.org (or just mac.perl.org) would be a good thing to
have as well as the win32 one.

Randy (you can have my Linux laptop when you pry it from cold, dead... wow,
       that Macbook Pro is awful shiny...)
-- 
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Randy J. Ray      Sunnyvale, CA      http://www.rjray.org   rjray at blackperl.com

Silicon Valley Scale Modelers: http://www.svsm.org