POLLY: An IDE for Parrot

[Daniel Berlin]

On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Warren Postma wrote:

> Polly 1.0
> ---------
>
> What Is It?
> -----------
>
> A nice Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the Parrot language
> invented by GvR and the Wall-meister, with contributions from the open
> source community.
>
> Online Help Feature
> --------------------
>
> When you hit F1, it will print out a random insult, and suggest that you
> read a randomly generated ANSI,
> ISO, or MIL-STD spec serial number,

Ooh ooh. can it point you to sections that don't exist, saying something
like "Section 37.2.1 of the ANSI standard [serial number
59129120918201212] *obviously* explains why this is", when the standard
only goes up to section 12?
>  and impolitely suggest that you go away,
> or it will pop up a prefabricated answer from the code-snippet library of
> one of the friendly neighborhood usenet-Bots, translating from Python
> internal syntax to Parrot syntax for display, and inserting one hard to find
> scope error along the way, courtesy of mangled indentations, similar to the
> functionality built into Outlook Express.

Warning, these mangling rules may not work on IMAP or HTTP servers.

> This feature alone should really
> lower the congestion on comp.lang.perl and comp.lang.python substantially.

Except for the posting of the user tracking serial numbers, right?

>
> GUI Builder
> ------------
>
> The GUI uses a combination of Tk, wxWindows, and the raw XLib and Win32 GDI
> APIs.
Yummy.
>   The GUI Frames manager has a built in "themes" mode that can  simulate
> (a) incredibly ugly Tk widgets, (b) Win32 text widget that flicker, and
> Win32 32x32 16 color Icons that just plain refuse to appear, or (c)
> WxWindows widgets that consume 10Kb of additional memory per window event or
> mouse click, for each item on the screen.
I think I've seen "c" , but it was productized under the name
"Microsoft Outlook".

You also forget the native mode, which displays gtk windows that randomly
print assertions and useles warnings to the console, and look really nice
, with antialiased fonts and all, but only if the font is 37k in
filesize, not mono-space, or you haven't bolded the second word.
Otherwise, it looks like someone ran across the screen  dropping the
antialiased letters at random places.  It also crashes in weird and
exciting ways, never reproducable the same way twice, but often enough to
make you scared to do things in it.  IE, it adapts the user to it, rather
than adapting to the user.



>
>
> Any interest?

I'm in.