Introducing PyConsole!

I have been pretty inactive this year, unlike what I planned (yawn, haven't heard from DLTK since June either) . I started learning Python earlier this year and felt the need of an embedded python shell inside Eclipse. This was something PyDev is missing [Edit: Simone pointed out that PyDev already has this neat feature, I was late to discover it] as compared to other python tools in Linux such as Eric. So I decided to write one.

PyConsole is direct result of my irregular and intermittent Eclipse development (lately), it's very simple plug-in with a basic exploit of Eclipse Console View and manages two way synchronized I/O from the python interpreter process controlled by a background Eclipse job. It provides few basic features anyone might expect from a shell such as syntax highlighting, command history etc.

Here's the code repository if anyone would like to check it out. If you have suggestions or feedback please write to me or create a bug.

Six reasons why you should know internals of your IDE

May be this is overwhelmingly obvious to geeks, but I am going to describe it nonetheless. This might not significantly impress non-developers or the people and programmers (yes, they are different) who can't describe the word 'tooling'. A developer's productivity is highly dependent on the tools they use, whether it's a fancy big fat IDE platform or an editor as abstemious as VI.

Apparently, the business we work for doesn't really care for the tools we use most of the time - unless of course they are suppose to pay for it. But as simple as it is, If you know how the IDE you use works and how you can make it work the way you want, can make all the difference in your productivity. Here are some unimpressive hows:

1. Many mundane and stupefyingly boring tasks can be automated if your IDE supports macros or extensions. Learn it, it will relieve your back/wrist pain.

2. You may have some fun exploring a totally different software architecture than you may be writing day-to-day, this may turn out to be way too interesting than your day job. Learn it you will know how to design.

3. Sometimes your IDE is just used for a single purpose - coding, but If you know how to extend it you might be motivated to add some cool stuff to it like chat view next to problems view in Eclipse or may be rolling reddit RSS entries in status bar. Learn it, possibilities are never ending.

4. Integrate your IDE to reproduce bugs in your application. This is similar to 1 but different in the way it solves your problem, this may not always possible but worth a thought. I managed to write several plug ins for quickly reproducing bugs related to my application components. Learn it and you can quickly fix them.

5. You can devise custom metrics from your code like how many lines you delete everyday compared to how many you write. Learn it and you will get to know your weird programming habits.

6. You never know when you get in to alternative job market if you know your tools well. Tool developers are far less than application developers. So learn how your IDE works and you might end up earning more money than your own job pays.


All of these, among others I can't really word without beer, are from my own experience. Since Level 1 Human Programmer in 'M$-Land' I've been curious about the tools I use, right from Visual Studio Add-in to Eclipse plug-ins, it has been wonderfully interesting journey so far. Given a chance to speak and I would totally be interested in how Eclipse is architected and how Gel used to support extensions and how painful it used to be to debug Add-ins in Visual Studio 6.0. Boy, it is interesting!

State of Eclipse based Python Development Tools

For starters, Python Interpreter console isn't a bad place for trying hands on the language. But if you plan on building larger programs with it you will need a good development environment, There are plenty of integrated development environments for Python today. Most of them are freely available open source projects, some have specialized support for GUI building while some are general purpose.

Since I'm Eclipse platform zealot, the first one I used was PyDev, PyDev is excellent python tooling built on Eclipse platform. It builds on excellent Eclipse UI and non commercial version offers basic refactoring, integrated debugging, Jython integration, Unit testing and several regular features which most Eclipse based IDEs inherit.

When it comes to dynamic languages tooling, DLTK is one potential place to look for in Eclipse Ecosystem. From time to time I'm lurking around DLTK newsgroups as well as keeping an eye on things moving in codebase for Python IDE. As of today, Python support in DLTK isn't too bad but it's still not as good as other IDEs out there, although it's coming up slowly. Eclipse DLTK is one fantastic tooling idea, it is so cool to build IDE for dynamic languages that you might want to try your hands building one, have a look at the guide here.

Out of Eclipse ecosystem, Eric is an IDE which I got chance to try hands on so far. Although It doesn't look as refreshing as PyDev or Eclipse in general, but it's pretty decent IDE nevertheless. It has lot of features, so many of them that you will confuse yourself on where to start, Eric UI has to be the last thing to impress anyone. It primarily features syntax highlighting editor, refactoring tool, debugger, package diagram viewer, regex builder, integrated version control and Python shell among others. While I'm not sure if Netbeans has any rock solid plan to support Python as Eclipse DLTK but I came across JPyDbg which is cross-IDE (and one of it's kind) for Python development. JPyDbg is kind of inspiring idea and I'm wondering if cross-ide-platform plugins would be a good idea? but that deserves separate post.

I haven't mentioned JyDT etc. because they seem to be dying or not actively compatible with later Eclipse versions. I would keep posting on python tooling as I go along working more on it.

PS: DLTK, I'm watching you.

What I want to do coming year?

I have been bored programming dear old enterprise applications lately, so I am seriously thinking of doing something new and more intellectual than writing data-driven applications.

I'm thinking of doing something significant coming year; while it would be pretty tough to stick to it all year along, I would at least want to build a strong tooling around, barely known, Felix language. Felix, compiler is written in OCaml, seems to be an interesting procedural/functional scripting language. In coming months I want to build an IDE for Felix using Eclipse and DLTK sub-project. There are many strong motivations for me to start this off apart from working on something intellectually stimulating and looking DLTK from inside.

I have just downloaded sources for OCaml, Python and Felix and compiling them to get started. As of now there's no progress and I'm yet to learn python, Objective Caml, Felix and DLTK itself, but I'm sure it would be a lot of fun.

While compiling OCaml on Ubuntu 7.10 I got this error

/usr/bin/ld: crt1.o: No such file: No such file or directory

and thanks to this guy for reminding that I'm not just Ubuntu user but a developer as well and would need libc-dev for just about everything :).

I'm looking forward to creating something interesting.