Recommended IDE...?

[Peter Corlett]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 10:18:14AM -0000, Andrew wrote:
> Looking to try using an Integrated Development Environment.

Why? What problem are you having that you expect an IDE to solve?

The features I find most compelling in IDEs is background parsing to
immediately spot syntax errors and be able to auto-complete or otherwise spot
typoes or confusion about what type a method returns. However, this only really
works with statically-typed compiled languages such as Java. Perl is very much
the antithesis of Java and you don't really get these benefits.

They also provide various hot keys and shortcuts to perform test compiles, VCS
integration and whatnot, but that's really only of marginal benefit.

> Is there an industry standard everyone uses and I should get familiar with,
> or will any do?

Pretty much every Perl developer I know uses Emacs and/or (n)vi and a shell
prompt, on some kind of Unix (typically Linux or MacOS). Windows is broken and
has an unusable shell, so it comes as no surprise that IDEs are more popular on
that platform.

> My previous experience is with NotePad and TextWrangler.
> I've Windows98SE and OSX 10.5.8 [Leopard] ;-), and use both in tandem via a
> KVM switch, XD.

If your hardware is contemporaneous with your operating system, it's not going
to be powerful enough to run a modern IDE. Might I suggest you try GW-BASIC? :)