Commercial Mac IDE

[Bob Ippolito]

On 8/11/06, Simon Chappell <simonpeterchappell@REDACTED> wrote:
> On 8/11/06, Vlad Dumitrescu <vladdu55@REDACTED> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On 8/11/06, Joel Reymont <joelr1@REDACTED> wrote:
> > > I want to build and sell a Mac IDE for Erlang. Elegant, powerful,
> > > easy to use. Something I would use myself to build other things I
> > > have in mind. So please let me know what you think and hold no punches!
> >
> > This is a large project, and if only for Macs, usefult for not so many...
>
> On the other hand, the Mac community have a strong track record of
> supporting shareware authors by actually paying for the software.
> While normally, an outsider might view the Mac community as too small,
> they generally are capable of supporting quite an amount of shareware
> authors.
>
> Oh and they tend to be fairly fanatically loyal as well. :-)

That is absolutely true. Also, Erlang is a really good fit for Mac OS
X, since their entire product line is multi-core (except for the
lowest end Mac Mini, as of Monday).

I'm interested in seeing Cocoa bindings for Erlang. I doubt I'd invest
in learning yet another IDE, but I'd probably donate or buy it if it
was cheap enough just to support the work (but only if the Cocoa
bridge was liberally licensed open source).

> > Just a thought: have you looked at Eclipse and Erlide? It works on Macs too!
>
> I've used Eclipse, but I haven't tried Erlide.
>
> Personally, I'd gladly consider a dedicated Erlang IDE on the Mac. If
> it wasn't priced too high, I'd most likely buy it.
>
> A decent IDE and good tutorials are the primary things holding most of
> us beginners that lurk on the list. I know I believe in the principles
> of Erlang, but I haven't quite written the critical mass of lines of
> code necessary to really feel like I've "groked" it.

I think the first step is to make Erlang easy to install. erlrt and
repos goes a long way to making this happen, but the current versions
are kinda busted (at least on Mac OS X, especially intel).

I've sent some emails to the author letting him know what was broken
in erlrt and how to fix it. However, the sources that assemble the
erlrt self-installers and the whole of repos don't seem to be
available to the public at this time so I was only able to get the
fundamental stuff fixed. I'd have done more if the sources were
available.

We need something where anybody can get erlang+yaws up in 5 minutes
without writing any configuration files by hand. It's so close, and
hopefully it'll be there soon.

-bob