Goo Wobble

On the weekend I wondered if re-implementing the IDE-like features of The Goo was really a good idea? Was I wasting my time? Reinventing the wheel? Am I nuts?

So I downloaded "Eclipse", the IDE of the moment, and installed the Perl EPIC plugin. The raison d'etre of The Goo is to help programmers stick Things together, and there is one feature I simply can't do without: the ability to traverse the structural associations in your program. For example, I often want to traverse the inheritance hierarchy - what's in the superclass? When I clicked on the "Outline View" in Eclipse it took me no further than the program itself. I'm sure the class browser is more impressive for Java programs but for Perl programs I came to a deadend fast. :-(

I don't know about you but my programs hardly ever work in isolation - they always involve other Things. When I write a program I often have to context switch between these Things (e.g., program -> output, program -> file, program -> database, program -> log, program -> shell, program -> other programs etc). The Goo should help you to make all these context switches - fast.

So I closed Eclipse, noted the stream of uncaught Java exceptions in my console, and jumped back into the bosom of The Goo. No more wobbles.