One development IDE to rule them all

D

drdeutsch

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Howdy all,

I'm slowly getting back into programming with the help of Reddit's carlhprogramming and MIT's OpenCourseWare.

I have Visual Studio 2008 and really enjoy it, but I can't seem to figure out how to debug/run python scripts from it. I've read about IronPython, but a lot of reviews say it'll screw stuff up and it's not dependable. Of course, I could go with Eclipse and PyDev, which seems to be a favorite, but I would, most likely, continue using VS08 for everything else (unless I end up really enjoying Eclipse - I haven't tried it yet).

So... is there a way to debug .py scripts from VS08 or should I go with Eclipse? What is the one Development IDE (Windows) to rule them all?

Thanks.
 
There is no one to rule them all. For C++ and .NET languages, VS2008 destroys anything else on the market. For Java and PHP (and probably others), I prefer Eclipse. And there are some languages that don't have IDEs or aren't supported by the major ones.
 
I can't help you answer your question, OP, but I must say that while I love pretty much everything else about Visual Studio, what I don't like is that it can't compile C++ files in multithreaded fashion on a per-file basis as opposed to a per-project basis, so you have to write scripts and make your own build system to do that.
 
Never going to happen. Pick the best tool for project at hand and proceed.
 
I've done python in eclipse but always end up going back to the default python editor.
Sometimes simple is perfect.
On the IDE front, I've really become a fan of intellij.
Enough so, I might put in to get it for work.
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Vim or emacs. You're going to be hard pressed to find a universal editor that will completely replace Visual Studio for Windows development, tho.
 
I agree with others using something simple like emacs
never bothered with IDEs for stuff like python and perl.
 
eon said:
I agree with others using something simple like emacs
Click to expand...

The point is that emacs and vim aren't simple. They're both very flexible tools that can be extended to work with any language, tools & project layout you want. Of course, to really take advantage of them, you need useful command-line tools - they're not very Windows-ish.
 
Although I'm a big fan of vim, the original question was about an IDE, not an editor, so I'm not sure vim or emacs is a good answer here.

My suggestion would be to check out Eclipse or Netbeans, with my preference probably being for Eclipse. They each have an array of plugins for various languages, are fairly customizable, and aren't tying you down to Microsoft like Visual Studio will. VS is a good package and has some nice visual editing tools but I find it hard to work with (or get to work the way I want it) sometimes.
 
For python questions, I'll defer to the other IDE's and tools proposed.

For the LotR reference.... Well, I'm surprised that went beyond Arainach's first sentence in post #2. Reminds me of the Golden Hammer principle.
 
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In the business world its VS and Eclipse or some variant. But for all that it does, northing is anywhere as close to plug and play as Visual Studio. Install it and a a beginner is writing apps in minutes. Tied to Windows, EXCEPT you do have Silverlight which is becoming a hot topic now with it being front and center for Windows 7 Phone development.

It's ironic. In Visual Studio you will be able to write an app that works on Windows, Windows Phone, and even Macs. You can't even do that with Apple's tools for the iPhone.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions.
I have downloaded and tried Eclipse and it is actually quite nice. I think I will probably use it when working on python scripts.
I've also got Activestate Python and tend to use that for short problems when working through the python materials.
 
heatlesssun said:
In the business world its VS and Eclipse or some variant. But for all that it does, northing is anywhere as close to plug and play as Visual Studio. Install it and a a beginner is writing apps in minutes. Tied to Windows, EXCEPT you do have Silverlight which is becoming a hot topic now with it being front and center for Windows 7 Phone development.

It's ironic. In Visual Studio you will be able to write an app that works on Windows, Windows Phone, and even Macs. You can't even do that with Apple's tools for the iPhone.
Click to expand...

Visual studio blows for Java :LOL:
 
Hi folks,

As for the OP's language I find that I use the commercial version of ActiveState's Komodo for Perl/Python. It has a decent debugger and one of the better RegEx tools I have ever used. The free version is ok but not quite as good, that might meet your needs depending what sort of development you are going for mostly.

http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/ - Free Edition

http://www.activestate.com/komodo/ - Commercial Edition

Truth be told most scripting languages I don't use an IDE of late. I tend just to use my text editor e-TextEditor which is basically a Windows clone of TextMate. I use that for it's Multi-Column editing.

I admit for big projects an IDE is nice. Anything in C# VS2008 all the way. For Flex I use Eclipse with the FB plugin version within the Zend Editor (Customized Eclipse basically for PHP).

I have a large project coming up that I am planning to use Ruby with and I will likely use Komodo for it though I may check out RubyMine from Intellij and see how that works out but I doubt I switch.

HTH,
GK
 
G_K said:
Truth be told most scripting languages I don't use an IDE of late. I tend just to use my text editor e-TextEditor which is basically a Windows clone of TextMate. I use that for it's Multi-Column editing.
Click to expand...

I like e-Text Editor too. I use it for HTML/CSS because I love the code coloring, the functions/scripting, and the snippets. Definitely beats out any other text editor I've ever used for HTML/CSS in my opinion (Textmate on the Mac is probably better, as well as Coda, but I wouldn't know from experience).
 
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E-TextEditor looked really cool as a snippets tool for Actionscript, unfortunately the AS3 bundle seems to require you use cygwin to fix a typo in their config and then use another text editor to find/replace said type in a bunch of files before you can load it. Apparently, this has been a problem since 2008 and still not fixed. A bit disappointing.
 
It all depends on how big the project I'm working on is. If it's a large project, I like Aptana/Eclipse. If it's a quick/small project I like TextMate/e Editor
 
Code::Blocks is the IDE I use as most of my coding is done in C++. There is a Python plugin for it, and it supports many other compilers. You can find nightly builds on the forums.
 
CefiroZ said:
Although I'm a big fan of vim, the original question was about an IDE, not an editor, so I'm not sure vim or emacs is a good answer here.

My suggestion would be to check out Eclipse or Netbeans, with my preference probably being for Eclipse. They each have an array of plugins for various languages, are fairly customizable, and aren't tying you down to Microsoft like Visual Studio will. VS is a good package and has some nice visual editing tools but I find it hard to work with (or get to work the way I want it) sometimes.
Click to expand...

But vim can be configured to be an ide. can start builds, code completion, code blocks, collapsing code... you name it.
Out of all the IDE's out there (and I have tried most of them) I keep coming back to vim because my productivity his highest with it as an IDE
 
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