|
UnixReview.com
January 2007
Award-winning Komodo IDE Deserves Its Acclaim
by Cameron Laird
"ActiveState Komodo is the award-winning, professional
integrated development environment (IDE) for dynamic languages." That's
ActiveState's description
of its own product, one it claims "gives you the power
to quickly and easily accomplish all your development tasks."
ActiveState is largely correct — yet I rarely use the IDE. I'll explain why.
Professional-level scripting
To begin, let's quickly review vocabulary.
ActiveState Software Inc. (AS) bills itself as "the leading provider of
tools and services for dynamic languages such as Perl,
PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl." In fact, AS is essentially
the only substantial company that supports these
different programming languages. They've been mocked for
it; should a company make motorcycles, tractors, and
ultralights, just because they're all not conventional
automobiles?
There are actually respected manufacturers with such diverse products,
and AS seems to be successful in its support of what it
labels "dynamic languages" — "scripting" languages, to much of the outside
world. While part of the "dynamic" rubric just attempts to
sidestep the sneering that often accompanies "scripting",
AS makes a solid business and technical case for consideration
of high-level, dynamically typed, open-source languages in a
unified way.
|
