Eclipse is pluggable. EPIC is a plugin for eclipse that allows one to write perl. Eclipse was designed to be an environment for managing files and writing code. It is java-coding-centric second.
----
Give me strength for today..
I will not talk it away..
Just for a moment..
It will burn through the clouds..
and shine down on me.
| [reply] |
I saw this plugin few day ago! Did anyone try it? Is it a good
IDE for perl?
I did not have time to test it.
Thanks
| [reply] |
I tried it some time ago and used it for a small project. I rather liked it, so EPIC is part of my Eclipse setup. Then again, I never tried another Perl-specific IDE since I usually work with Emacs/bash.
You get an outline with the subroutines so that the code is easy to navigate. There's also a list with modules that are used in the file. It is easy to run a file: parameters can be specified and saved for future runs (button click). There's syntax highlighting and on-the-fly syntax checking with errors marked and explained.
All in all, EPIC is nice to use, although it still needs a lot of work when compared with the facilities the Java environment offers.
Just my 2 cents, -gjb-
| [reply] |
Hi
I use EPIC for almost all of my Perl coding. I think it's a great piece of work, and it's not even at the 1.0 release yet.
The lead programmer for EPIC is very good at responding to community-raised bugs and enhancements. Check out the comments on sourceforge.
Komodo is probably more robust, but then again, EPIC/Eclipse doesn't cost $300
- j
| [reply] |
IMO most the "deficiencies" in Java are deliberate - the idea is to make the code itself as unambiguous as possible, hence static typing, forced casts, declared exceptions, no means of doing runtime manipulation of classes etc. etc.
The whole point is to make tools like Eclipse possible - it's nice if you're refactoring - change the classname once and it automatically changes the classname in all code that uses it, for instance. It makes "drag & drop" coding a lot easier.
Fundamentally, any language code that does runtime manipulation (creating classes at runtime, adding methods, eval "" etc ) cannot take advantage of the more advanced features of and IDE like Eclipse. The IDE just won't be able to figure out all the complexity.
By the way, I think tools like eclipse don't make up for the lack of flexibility of the language at all. Eclipse doesn't "demolish" other languages - more flexible languages have many advantages over Java and in general require much less "boiler plate" code just to get it to compile. This in itself makes languages like Perl or Ruby or Python much more productive than Java will ever be, and you could argue that it those languages don't actually need a tool like eclipse.
Me, I think a refactoring IDE like eclipse with all the whiz-bang features on it for Perl or Ruby would be cool and useful, but I don't think we'll ever see it, and I don't think I need it for Perl as much as most people seem to need it for Java.
Disclaimer: I write all my perl code and most of my Java code in vim, and I've only use Eclipse once or twice for Java refactoring jobs.
| [reply] |
Ridiculous. Eclipse has an interesting plugin interface that I would like to copy for some perl projects, but what does it offer as an editor that hasn't been in Emacs for years? Hardly anything of value. It's just a bunch of people who never learned how to use any other decent editor who are finally spending some time with one and discovering that it makes their lives easier. | [reply] |
