Jon Udell talks about activestate. I interviewed with Activestate a while back, when I was actively looking for jobs, and it would have been wonderful to be able to work on some of the tools they work on. When I install Windows, one of the first things I download is activeperl and activepython. They were located in canada though, and that kind of spoilt it for me, being an international student from Pakistan, having to deal with the hassles of Visa and things like that. Oh well.
The focus of Jons blog post is actually dynamic languages, and here is an interesting quote:
Interactivity is another. When I met with Jim Hugunin recently, he told me that when he shows IronPython to folks inside Microsoft, they're most impressed by his ability to wield .NET libraries in an exploratory way from the command line. Who would have thought that the read-eval-print loop would seem like breakthrough technology in 2005?
And here is another:
ActiveState's Komodo is the leading example of an IDE for dynamic languages, but I've yet to find anyone who thinks Komodo is giving Visual Studio or Eclipse a run for their money.
I was really excited when I heard about Komodo. Maybe more so because it was based on XUL, the language for Mozillas interface. However, the product is closed, you have to buy it. There is an evaluation period but for people like me an evaluation period is too short and does not help. Maybe the product would gain more traction, if it was available for free for personal use/development. Maybe then it might gain some ground against eclipse or netbeans or what have you.
