"False exceptions?" (was Re: theme of the week: tools

[Marco Aschwanden]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 12:04:47 -0400, Dan Perl <danperl at rogers.com> wrote:

I myself felt disturbed by your comments on WingIDE. But yes, I do 
understand your nagging on "false exceptions" which can be turned off. You 
turned it down because of this and because the short trial period (which 
can be prolonged with 1 button click)... well, it didn't seem fair towards 
the tool. It has its shortcomings but the ones you mention are ridiculous.

It beats Komodo 3.01 in some aspect:
- it shines when it comes to auto-completion. No need to feed some 
"intelligent database" for each and every file you introduce like in 
Komodo (first crash while building the database).
- in my case it works seamlessly with wxPython. Komodo crashed constantly. 
Auto-completion with wxPython did never work (tried on 2 machines)
- WingIDE is much more robust although beta than Komodo, which crashed 
about 5 times during 3h of work (Win2K; about 20 times because of wxPython 
are not taken into account). WingIDE does not crash since around patch 3 
(we are now at patch 8).


So I would say:

Use Komodo if you:
- are programming as well in other languages that Komodo supports (PHP, 
Perl, Python, HTML, ...)
- need built-in cvs access
- can live with an IDE that crashes from time to time

Use Wingware if you:
- need a good "intelligent" auto-completion even for wxPython, pyQt, ...
- need an extensible IDE (you may in future add your own tools easily)
- need an IDE that focusses on Python and that tries to do the best on 
this single language
- can live with an IDE that does not look as polished as Komodo

This comparison is not perfect. But you may realize that I turned it down 
for it constantly crashing on me (which might be a problem of me and my 2 
machines) and the useless auto-completion (constantly feeding the 
database; does not work with wxPython). Those 2 points were in my case the 
show stopper. Sad, because the idea behind Komodo is just great, the looks 
is fantastic... I will give it another chance with 4.0...

Happy wing user,
Marco