[Padre-dev] Fwd: Perl IDE: EPIC, Padre

Thu Jul 2 14:35:17 PDT 2009

Two weeks ago I sent a messages to Jan Ploski the maintainer of
EPIC - the Perl Plugin of Eclipse. Here is our conversation.
It might be interesting to others as well.
(see also the next messages with his most recent response)

Gabor

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gabor Szabo <szabgab at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 9:48 AM
Subject: Re: Perl IDE: EPIC, Padre
To: Jan Ploski <jpl at plosquare.com>

hi Jan,

sorry for the slow response.

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 11:22 PM, Jan Ploski<jpl at plosquare.com> wrote:
> Hi Gabor,
>
> Thanks for notifying me about Padre. I read about it some time ago, I guess
> it was when you were just starting the project. Back then, like now, I found
> your stated motivation weak: "Eclipse is huge, to my experience is slow and
> you need to know Java to extend it" and "Komodo costs money". It sounds so
> much like the infamous not-invented-here excuse. Rather unconvincing for
> someone who's been using Eclipse since 2.0 (and knows how to extend it, too
> :-) and who wouldn't mind spending money on a great IDE either. I've
> basically shrugged off Padre and concluded that the project won't get
> anywhere far. The heroic coder will get bored in a few weeks and the world
> will be left with another 0.01 module stub in CPAN.
>
> So it's a pleasant surprise to see that you're making good progress and also
> successfully rallying fellow developers to assist you! This is based on what
> I could see in the screenshots and read on the project page, as the
> installation of the Debian (unstable) package failed:
>
> The following packages have unmet dependencies:
>  padre: Depends: libfile-path-perl (>= 2.07) but it is not installable
> E: Broken packages

Thanks for mentioning it. The Debian package should be fixed by now.

>
> I think that to win a broader user base you should be explicit and highlight
> some unique points of what it can do (or at least *will* do in the future)
> better than EPIC/Komodo. For example, if you could show that you can
> successfully use PPI for just-in-time Perl source parsing of large files,
> that would certainly attract attention, as would solid support for
> refactoring and accurate code navigation (smart things like type inference
> and intellisense). In other words, killer features. Right now, my impression
> is that the key selling point of Padre is that it is implemented in Perl.
> But I doubt that this alone can convince many users - most people who use
> EPIC run on Windows, and you can count on fingers of one hand the number of
> them who have requested any features related to DYI extensibility.

Good points. There has been some work in that direction and there are a
number of small refactoring features in Padre already. The PPI based
highlighting
is working but it is very slow and we don't see any quick solution to that.

I am not expecting EPIC users to switch to Padre but AFAIK there are tons of
people out there who use some editor (e.g. Notepad++ ) and who could gain a
lot by switching to Padre. There are also many people who are forced to use
Linux/Unix but who don't really know vi or emacs or any other editor running on
those machines and thus suffer a lot while writing Perl code.

BTW if would be interesting if you could share data with us on the
number of EPIC
users or some usage patterns you might have learned from them.

>
> As for cooperation, you are welcome to ask EPIC/Eclipse related questions
> and I will answer them as time permits. As you can see in EPIC
> forums/releases, it is cooking over low fire and has been in this state for
> a long time. When I got into development of EPIC, I needed a satisfactory
> Perl IDE within Eclipse, and it was rather buggy/inadequate back then - but
> still good enough to leave hope for improvement. Things are different now,
> my basic needs are satisfied, so there's little incentive to push it further
> of my own accord.
>
> Your idea of standalone refactoring tools that could be integrated into EPIC
> (or other IDEs, for that matter) sounds interesting. The crucial factor
> would be to 1) make it work - demonstrably! :-) and 2) avoid excess
> dependencies. EPIC currently has just one major dependency on PadWalker for
> debugging, and it's already causing some people trouble. Dependencies that
> must be taken care of by the user or may become broken through external
> actions are a major turn-off.

Though it depends on PPI and thus does not meet your requirement of minimal
dependency you might want to take a look at PPIx::EditorTools and
App::EditorTools.
These are the first refactoring tools escaping from the Padre source code to be
usable by others. It was moved out by Mark Grimes in order to use it in vim.
See it in action:
http://code-and-hacks.blogspot.com/2009/06/stealing-from-padre-for-vim.html

> Refactoring Perl is of course a huge challenge. Coming from Java, I'm
> somewhat skeptical about the attractiveness of a "partial support for
> refactoring". If you use a refactoring tool, you must be able to trust it
> not to introduce bugs into your code. Java (and I think .NET) refactoring
> tools absolutely do keep their promise in this respect, while tools for
> dynamic languages like Perl cannot. Of course, the original refactoring
> tools were for Smalltalk, so one might speculate that given good unit test
> coverage even imperfect tools are worthwhile. However, my experience is that
> refactoring tools are in most demand for bad (or even horrible) code and
> such code seldom arrives covered with good unit tests.

It certainly is a challenge.

> I'll keep an eye on Padre, and hopefully also get it to run some time soon!

I'd be happy to see your input!

BTW may I forward our conversation to the padre-dev mailing list so other can
also see it?

Gabor

>
> Best regards,
> Jan Ploski
>
> --
> Dipl.-Inform. (FH) Jan Ploski
> IT-Beratung und Software-Entwicklung
> Buergereschstr. 79 - 26123 Oldenburg - Germany
> Phone/Fax: +49 441 3407490 / +49 441 3407491
> E-Mail: jpl at plosquare.com
> URL: http://www.plosquare.com
>
>
> Gabor Szabo wrote:
>>
>> Hi Jan,
>>
>> I don't know if you have already heard about Padre or not so let me
>> introduce it:
>>
>> It is an open source Perl IDE being written in Perl using wxWidgets
>> and Scintilla for the GUI.
>>
>> There are a few developers in the group and we are slowly making progress.
>>
>> Lately I tried EPIC - my earlier attempts of getting started with
>> Eclipse failed - and it is really nice,
>> we will steal many ideas from there :-)
>>
>> Anyway, I am contacting you to ask if there is any way we could
>> cooperate on the two projects?
>>
>> We certainly would be glad to have your expertise on how Eclipse is
>> built and how EPIC
>> is interacting with it.
>> On the other hand we might help by turning the refactoring tools we
>> slowly add to be separate enough
>> so you can reuse them in EPIC.
>>
>> The home of Padre is at http://padre.perlide.org/ and while we have a
>> mailing list most of the action
>> is on the #padre IRC channel on irc.perl.org
>> Some of us use Mibbit to access it:
>> http://widget.mibbit.com/?server=irc.perl.org&channel=%23padre
>>
>> I'd be glad to hear from you or see you visit the channel!
>>
>> regards
>>  Gabor
>>
>>
>