> which can be used to force a code-style across the company (hence the name), which is a good counter argument to those that claim perl is unsuitable for large companies/projects.

Doesn't this contradict your later claim that Perl doesn't need an IDE??? ;-)

I like your line of reasoning. As I should state, this boils down to personal preference. I have worked in languages and technologies that are near unusable without an IDE. In many ways, it's also because the environment (read: Windows) doesn't support many of the userspace tools readily available to *NIX users, like grep, or has no readily-available way of printing out data-structures to STDOUT (e.g. Data::Dumper), and if and when you do inspect structures, they are unreadable.

Perl, OTOH, can dump any structure at any point, and you can always figure out "what does perl think X is" which is basically what you need debugging for. There's also less need of the "Intellisense" feature since you're not dealing with tens of thousands of classes and methods, and the libraries you choose have usually a simple and well documented API (yey CPAN Kwalitee).

As for company-mode and code style, I don't think this is an integral part of an IDE. It's more of a feature of existing IDEs, and you can accomplish the same in many other editors and tools, without having to lock-in to an IDE.

Emacs is not an IDE it's an IDE construction set!

That is definitely *the* selling point of emacs, and you can construct it to better suit your needs. Whether you want a debugger, or a code-style, or some sort of CI, it's all available in emacs. You can also integrate emacs with a bug-tracker or similar, and I again point to Org-mode as an excellent project management tool. Also, it has one of the better git integration with magit, which can be seriously helpful in development.

Come to think about it, I would say that, while perl doesn't need an IDE, software development of large projects or in a large company does need a lot of tools to assist the streamlining of the development, and emacs has all of those, and then some.