I am starting a new thread re. Padre, with the note that the ONLY reason I am posting this on the PDL list is because this conversation started on this list, and referred to Padre's usability vis a vis PDL development. If this becomes a long thread, I would be happy to close it here and I move it to Padre's list (or, just close it and forget about it). So, with apologies to those who don't care about Padre...
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 1:10 AM, Shlomi Fish <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi P Kishor, > > I'm replying regarding Padre because I'm a Padre contributor and I'm friends > with some of its developers (though I'm still using gvim on GNU/Linux > primarily). > > On Tuesday 20 Apr 2010 00:46:15 P Kishor wrote: >> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 4:21 PM, David Mertens <[email protected]> wrote: >> > On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 1:52 PM, P Kishor <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Breaking this thread into what should have been two threads to begin >> >> with... >> >> >> >> >> > I started working on PLplot but got sidetracked. I've had a mind to write >> > up how to clean up the old documentation and write new PDL documentation >> > guidelines, but I've not gotten around to it. For now, the rule of thumb >> > is this: use your local copy of the documentation (which for me displays >> > beautifully in Padre) or use the documentation generated for >> > Sourceforge. >> >> Sorry, Padre is not an option for me. I could never get it to work on >> my Mac, and the purported rewards from installing it are simply not >> high enough for me to justify bearing the pain. > > You seem incredibly emotional about it. > ha! ha! Not "incredibly emotional," but I would say incredibly practical, actually. I tried, really, I tried very honestly and diligently many different ways to install and work with Padre. In the end, I failed. Even though there are enough installation experiences with regards to PDL that I have failed at, I still consider the ultimate reward of working with PDL to be extremely high and worth the pain. Partly, that is because PDL doesn't have an adequate replacement. Believe me, if it did, the pain-reward ratio would get skewed. Wrt editors, I have a ton of alternatives. And, partly, different products evoke and merit different responses -- for some strange reason, I find it more rewarding to go the open source route with scientific computing than flogging myself so I can go the open source route for a programmer's editor. I don't have any scientific reason for this... that is just how it is. Perhaps for the same reason that I love open source but use Apple's proprietary Mac OS X which itself is a mix of proprietary and open code. In any case, PDL is, to me, something that brings the fun and magic of computing back to, well, computing, and to Perl. Hence, I pursue it. >> I tried to install it >> from source, and found that I needed a threaded perl. > > Well, I was told that on Mac OS X installing CPAN modules on the built-in perl > directly is not recommended and you must always compile it yourself and use > it, so it's not that bad. > >> I installed a >> threaded perl and failed in installing Padre even then. > > How did you fail? What happened exactly? Can you be more specific? > Here is how it unfolded... I installed Padre via cpan, per the instructions, and then discovered that Padre didn't work with my installed perl which was non-threaded. At that time, I was gung-ho about getting Padre to work, so I went ahead and reinstalled a threaded perl (since I have my own custom perl at /usr/local, I can mess with it, even though it is a waste of my time messing with it). Padre still choked up saying that it won't work because Wx-Perl-ProcessStream was broken on Perl 5.10.1 on a Mac! By this time my risk-reward ratio was close to skewing unfavorably. Then, the following happened... >> Then I found a >> binary .dmg for Macs on the Padre web site, downloaded it, but it >> crashes on every invocation. I informed the folks on Padre IRC, but no >> one responded. > Actually, the first time I informed folks on the IRC, they did respond. I think the problem was that the .dmg was only for Snow Leopard (I could be wrong here... I am trying to recollect), but there was not even a small notice with the download that any other OS would not work (I am still on Leopard). I had a conversation on IRC, and there was some back and forth on how the Padre web site should be updated with this tiny bit of important metadata so folks are not left guessing. Well, I guess that never happened. I don't remember now what version of Padre that was, but I recently downloaded Padre again. There is still no metadata as to what version of OS I need, but I went ahead and tried it anyway. It just dies on me on every click, so off to the trash it went. Maybe I will try Padre once it reaches v. 1.0, or when its reported benefits become too high to ignore, esp. vis a vis PDL. I do appreciate though that a community of developers is dedicated to creating a perl-specific IDE. Of course, no project (at least, none of my own projects) uses only one language. I typically work on web based projects, so I need one environment for html, css, javascript, SQL and perl. I realize that any one environment that can do all these will be less efficient at all these (jack of all and master of none, and all that), but from a usability point of view, me having to learn only one IDE will make me more efficient. Always a trade-off of some sort. -- Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is science ======================================================================= _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
