I've taken the plunge and installed Linux (Linux Mint 9 if that's important) on one of the boxes - and I'd like to start some small-time programming... but where to start.
My background:
Mostly LOB-applications in C#/WPF
Some XAL-basic
A wee bit of VB/VBA and SilverLight
I would like to turn to a new programming language - but still focused on desktop applications.
What I need:
An editor - preferably with good intellisense
A programming languages and the resources to get started
If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd be happy for a little push...
EDIT:
Thanks for all the advice - I've come up with the following:
I'll start out with Python - and use Vim for the editor
I'll definetly try out Vala and Perl later and have MonoDevelop as backup editor - and if all else fails, I'll turn to C++. I've upvoted all answers as they all helped me.
EDIT2:
Okay - Vim was a bit too hardcore... Installed Cream on top.
Unlike the Windows world, where everything is designed to be Windows-only, I think it is quite typical to find that the rest of the world designs software to specifications, not to implementations. If you are developing in Java, then it doesn't matter what platform you intend to use, and Eclipse and NetBeans provide excellent tooling for Java on all platforms, Linux included. If you are developing in C++, then Boost and Qt provide excellent cross-platform support. If you need to go outside of Boost or Qt, then before delving into Linux-specific features, it is best to target the Single UNIX Specification also known as IEEE Std. 1003.1 POSIX, which will ensure that your application not only runs on Linux, but also on any UNIX-compliant operating system (including Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and others).
As for IDEs and other editors... I think most programmers on UNIX platforms build from the commandline (using CMake, Make, scons, or some other standard build tool); however, there are plenty of IDEs with support for those that can run such tools automatically. Anjuta C++ and KDevelop are probably the easiest IDEs to use on Linux. Emacs (emacs, emacs-gtk, xemacs) and Vim (vim, gvim) provide a great deal of power and flexibility, but take a little bit more time to get used to. You might also want to consider a basic text editor such as GEdit (Gnome) or Kate (KDE); GEdit, though billed as a simple text editor, supports some more advanced coding features via a number of plugins. I don't recall whether it supports autocompletion, but it does support line numbers, automatic indenting, using spaces instead of tabs, commenting a block of code en-masse, and executing a Makefile with a shortcut.
Depends on how much you want to learn (from the easiest option to the hardest one):
Just use C# via Mono - that gives you access to most of the POSIX interfaces via Mono.UNIX, access to GTK# so you can do desktop apps, access to many linux libraries, so you can do more advanced stuff / integrate better. (you can program in Monodevelop - it's a Sharpdevelop clone, kind of VS-ish)
Learn Vala - it's a language compiled down to C, very similar to C# but closer to the bare minimum. It's gathers anti-MS people who wanted a response to C# IMHO. (never really used it, but apparently there's a Vala plugin for Monodevelop and the language itself is becoming more popular)
Learn Python - it's a scripting language. It's got bindings to most popular libraries (also GTK and QT) (IDE: anything that can edit text - you won't get good intellisense from a dynamic language anyways)
Learn C++ and QT, or C and GTK - although those are very low level languages where you will spend a lot of time just getting used to the environment. (IDE: Anjuta, Kdevelop, Monodevelop with C++ plugin, Eclipse+CDT, emacs, vim, etc. - anything goes really)
If you want "something new", but don't want to spend loads of time learning a completely new environment, I'd recommend trying out Vala. If you're more curious about different styles, go for Python, which I think has a very good tutorial for new people (but not new to programming): Tutorial or Beginner's Guide. With Python you also have an advantage of having the whole environment available in packages in any distribution, no such luck with Vala (yet).
Try perl and python and see what appeals to you. Learn bash to get around happily at the command-line. If you're feeling adventurous, give C/C++ a shot.
As for editors, this will probably spark up a holy war, but if you're using at the command line, check out vim and emacs, pick one, and lament never making friends of those in the "enemy camp." :-)
I say Python + Emacs or gEdit (what ever suits you)
Linux Mint is a KDE environment, right? That would make it pretty convenient for you to get started writing KDE apps in C++. The Qt toolkit which KDE is based on is widely considered to be relatively developer-friendly, which should make it easy for you to get started.
If you want to go on that route, I'd suggest downloading KDevelop, which is KDE's IDE (optimized for developing KDE programs, but it can handle several different languages). Alternatively, you could use Eclipse, which has C++ capability. You can find tutorials on how to develop KDE apps at http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials. (Unfortunately I think those are not as good as the documentation they used to have before KDE 4 came out, but it should be enough to get you started.)
EDIT: Come to think of it, you may want to try your hand at writing some C++ console (non-GUI) applications first, since it's probably easier to get comfortable with basic C++ before you jump into GUI programming. Given your experience, it shouldn't be too hard to pick up. Unfortunately I don't know of any particularly good resources to learn C++ with, but I'm sure that information is somewhere on this site, and KDevelop or Eclipse would work fine as an IDE for simple C++ console apps as well.
Weird that nobody suggested ALP, even if it is a bit outdated, it teached me a lot of things regarding the UNIX way of programming.
First, Learning C is a MUST!
Perl is underused for most stuff and you'll want to learn BASH Shell Scripting instead.
Grock the C code of existing (stable, well-written software) example is the Linux kernel itself! Google "Linux LXR"
Once you learn the basics to C (in Linux) the manpages are an invaluable resource. Just do man printf for information on writing characters to the screen, for example.
If you are talking GRAPHICAL GUI Programs, you need to learn GTK+ or one of the many cross-platform GUI toolkits (e.g. wxWidgets). Do not learn to program the X Windows System directly unless you are crazy.
For text editors, I like Komodo Edit and SciTE.
Related
I am attempting to develop a GUI application for Tails. I'm doing the initial development on Debian 8 since development directly in Tails can be a pain.
I started out using Anjuta, but the documentation is essentially non-existent. The Anjuta website has nothing at all about how Glade is integrated or how to use it. I can't even track down documentation on how to change the main window title. The only tutorial I found has you start a project and build it using the default files that are generated for a GTKmm project.
Is there a good book or online tutorial out there for doing GUI development in Anjuta?
This is maybe not a complete answer, but it's too large to put in as a comment. I use Anjuta fairly regularly, but I share your feeling about the missing documentation (which is, by the way, not unique for Anjuta). I appreciate Anjuta (and Glade) very much, so don't take the following as criticisms on either program.
I would recommend you consider using PyGTK for GUI creation. It is a lot more productive. You can design the GUI in Glade - exactly the same way you would do for C/C++ - and then implement the code in Python, which you can also edit and manage from Anjuta. There are plenty of code examples, for example on the nullege code search engine.
About the work flow in Anjuta (for C/C++). It is based mainly on the Autotools system, so you should really read up a little on make, Makefile, and related tools. Though in principle Anjuta manages this, you will, sooner or later hit a problem, and some knowledge about Autotools will help you a long way (also this tutorial or this one. This slide series is interesting - probably because it is more graphical. There are even some video tutorials, like this one.).
There is no real necessity to use Glade from inside Anjuta. In fact, Glade has passed a long process distancing itself from 'code generation'. It now only contains an XML generator, which can be called separately. I find the screen space left for Glade inside Anjuta insufficient for comfortable work anyway.
So, in conclusion: If you mainly need a GUI, consider Python + Gtk. If you do need C or C++, Anjuta is a great IDE, but look at Gtk Development examples (like this one). Following those, the use of Anjuta should be a lot clearer.
EDIT:
Very useful answer. I have some underlying legacy code that has to be
C++. Is there a way to mix Python and C++ in Anjuta, or do you know of
any guideposts or tutorials for such?
You can open a C++ project in Anjuta - maybe even import you legacy code directly as a Makefile project. You can also add new files to your C/C++ project and create them as Python files. I've never tried to do that though, and I'm not sure how Anjuta would treat them, for example, in the Makefile(s). I don't have large projects mixing languages at the moment, but for small projects, I like 'Geany', because it doesn't get in the way. You do have to maintain the Makefiles manually.
I'm using Emacs + Typerex for OCaml programming. I have tried OcaIDE before in Windows. It's not as nice as Typerex, but it does have a good feature: Ocaml Browser
Is there anyway to have such a browser in Typerex?
(eclipse + OcaIDE in linux might work, but I do not like it as much as typerex)
Thanks
ocamlbrowser is actually the name of a program that has been distributed with the OCaml compiler for a very long time. It is written with LablTk, maintained by Jacques Garrigue, and was inside the "ocaml distribution" (instead of an external tool) because it accessed .cmi files in ways that rely on internal details of the compiler.
So the short answer is: "yes, just call ocamlbrowser in your terminal" (assuming your distribution packaged ocamlbrowser with the compiler, which may or may not be the case; there may be a separate ocamlbrowser package instead). The look&feel of the tool may be a bit dated compared to a shiny Eclipse version, but it indeed exists and works fine.
My friend and I are looking to play around with building a browser game (e.g. Farmville) from a linux environment. Flash seems to be the way most browser games are built, but from what I google flash programming can't be easily (at all?) done from linux. Java seems like the leading candidate, but I am rather bamboozled by all the options out there. What platforms should I consider?
As an aside, I have a strong-ish C++ background and some professional experience with Python.
For browser based games, there are 2 main options if I remember correctly:
Flash, as you've already noted is the most common options. Usually this is done using adobe's software (around $200) or just an actionscript compiler (which is more programming like then normal flash). For Linux, your best bet may be: Burrito 4 Linux with the flashpunk libraries for your game engine.
Second most common option is Java, in which case you'd have to use the .applet package for.
Since you have C++ experience, I would recommend trying a flash actionscript compiler. I've personally used FlashBuilder, but I could not run it in Linux, so your next best option is Burrito 4 Linux noted above.
Hope this helps!
Use the FREE adobe flex SDK on linux.
Gives you flash/flex libraries, and command line tools to compile SWFs, flex, and air applications.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
I'd just like to ask if there are other alternatives for REALStudio or Runtime Revolution?
I'm not looking for something like a .NET framework or a plugin. I want it to be fully self-contained like the aforementioned IDEs.
It should also be cross-platform.
NOTE:
Please don't mention Java. I already know of it.
Just to be clear, I'm looking for a programming environment that would let me create a desktop application for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux...
I still feel like I'm shooting in the dark by answering this question. It's unclear if you're looking for a programming language and GUI toolkit, or if you just want an IDE that is cross-platform. It's also unclear why you are abandoning REAL Studio, since it seems to meet your requirements.
Anyway, there are really a lot of options here, especially if you don't need one that uses the REALbasic language. I can only talk about the ones I am familiar with and have experience in using. Others can surely tell you more about dynamic languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. etc.
First off, I'm not sure why you think that the .NET Framework is not "fully self-contained". Yes, it requires a runtime, much like Java does. But those two managed languages have gotten quite a bad rap for requiring a runtime. It seems people have forgotten that programs compiled in C and C++ can often require a runtime as well (at least they do on Windows).
I would take a second look at .NET. It is an extremely easy-to-use, rapid development environment, much in the style of REALbasic. VB.NET retains a lot of the syntax, while bringing you (in my opinion) even more powerful features. Since almost all desktop applications should be distributed with an installer (setup program), the requirement of a runtime is really a non-issue. Your installer should install the necessary dependencies at the same time as your application—the user will never be the wiser.
Of course, producing a desktop application with a user interface that is truly native across all three of your target platforms is going to be difficult at best. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux all have vastly different platform conventions, and even though you can find environments that will let you generate an executable that runs on all those platforms, none of them are going to produce interfaces that actually look like a native application. I'm extremely picky about this, and you'll find that Mac users are, too. Windows and Linux users are much more accepting, but following standard platform conventions is the key to making your app easy to use and easy to understand. Conforming to the behavior the user expects and taking advantage of native widgets has a lot of advantage that developers (often prone to reinvent the wheel) seem to be forgetting recently.
The absolute best thing to do (in my opinion) is to write your code in a portable language like C++, and create the user interface using tools provided for each platform (For Windows, you might use the Windows API, or WinForms or WPF provided by the .NET Framework. For Mac OS X, you'll use Cocoa and Apple's Xcode/Interface Builder. For Linux, you'll do whatever it is Linux people do.) Then, you just have to recompile your application on each platform, and you get the best of both worlds.
A good compromise would be to use a GUI toolkit for C++ like Qt or wxWidgets that promises to generate cross-platform applications. Yes, the apps themselves are truly cross-platform, but they don't always have truly native interfaces. I understand that Qt has gotten better recently, but it's still not up to my standards. You and your users might be less picky. Note the "your users" part there. The Mac Office team discovered that Mac OS X users just wouldn't accept the ribbon as it was implemented in Windows. Mac Office 11 finally brings the ribbon to the Mac, but it looks completely different, having been entirely reimplemented to look like a native Mac OS X widget. By contrast, Apple's iTunes sticks out like a sore thumb on Windows. What's long been the standard for an innovative, easy-to-use interface on the Mac is regarded by many PC users as an abomination. But then again, native GUI is sort of my soapbox, so if you care, I recommend perusing my answers to other, similar questions:
Advice for supporting both Mac and Windows Desktops
What is the best library to use when writing GUI applications in C++?
If you goal is to have a self contained IDE with an easy to use GUI builder, that can produce standalone cross platform executables, then to the best of my knowledge, the options are pretty limited.
If you like BASIC (similar to RealBasic or RunRev), then you may want to look at www.PureBasic.com . Documentation and new material is sparse, IMHO. It has it’s own GUI builder, but for a bit more cash, you may want to pair it with PureVision.
For cross platform development using wxWidgets programming in C++, wxPython, wxLua or wxRuby, you may want to consider DialogBlocks.
The answers given here are terrible of course, but the question you are asking is a difficult one and there may not be an answer. I'm asking myself the same question as REALStudio doesn't work as well as I would like. Java is poor, difficult and ugly. .NET is the favourite but not cross platform.
Consider that appearance is a major problem. If the GUI doesn't look native, there's no reason why you can't design something superior (look at MojoWorld for example). I would tentatively suggest REBOL. Although it appears to be an interpreter a compiler could be purchased. As the software is free, if your program works reasonably well you might then buy the compiler. Not sure if it has an interface builder as the buttons are generated by code. The free version is moderately poor but has been improving in recent years.
Not being able to update the interface from a thread (Cocoa for example, I guess NextStep is really old now) seems to defeat the whole object of the exercise. Having Timers that don't run (REALStudio) also seems hopeless given that those are supposed to update the interface instead. Then you have Object-Orientation, an excuse for poor programmers unable to understand code. Not being able to 'GOTO' a button unless you put the code into a Timer pretending that it's a module (yey for for REALStudio). I can understand your problems. Try to realise that programming is HARD and that it only looks easy when you see the end results produced by experts like Apple.
So Java is proof that cross platform doesn't work. Give REBOL a try.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
What good IDEs are there for R in Linux?
I've tried Rcmdr and Eclipse, but neither seems to have the same usability as Tinn-R in Windows. Are there any other options?
A newcomer to the scene, which IMO looks very promising - and downright baller - relative to other existing IDEs like Rattle and JGR, is RStudio. It's free software, is cross-platform, looks very polished, and even has features like automatic refactoring.
Update 2012-04-12: I've been running it for a bit on our DB server, and I love that it's a web app that saves your sessions, resume-able from anywhere else. Plotting requires not only no X tunneling or png-writing but is easier to use than out-of-the-box R. Extremely easy to get up and running, and it comes with packages for Debian/Ubuntu (which I use).
The company/development is moving pretty fast, aiming to be the de facto standard IDE for all R users. If I'm gushing, it's probably because I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the IDE after a long time of using sub-par IDEs, not just for R but for plenty of other languages. So this was a bit out of the blue. I still need more time to really dig into it but I like what I'm seeing so far.
JGR isn't bad:
http://rforge.net/JGR/
Most people I know rave about Emacs + ESS:
http://ess.r-project.org/
But it's not quite the same thing as Tinn-R.
Along different lines ...
If you're looking at a high level functions for data mining, then Rattle is an option:
http://rattle.togaware.com/
and another high level app for interactive plotting:
http://code.google.com/p/playwith/
I have found that the Emacs-ESS combination is well worth the learning curve. I enjoy being able to:
have code and R console side by side
send the current line, paragraph, file, or function to the R console without touching the mouse
easily interact with R sessions on remote computers
enjoy all the editing abilities of Emacs
Here's the website for the project:
http://ess.r-project.org/
Here's a helpful document about ESS in particular:
http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/Refs/ess.pdf
Brand new IDE out there (as of Feb 2011) is http://www.rstudio.org/. Seems very promising from what I've seen so far.
Although Eclipse was mentioned by the OP, I do not know if he ment it with the StatET plugin.
Eclipse with StatET is a really great IDE besides e.g. EmacsSpeaksStatistics (ESS), but as in other environments the user have to learn it's the basic usage first. The only handicap of this IDE could be the relatively high resources requirements as based on Java, but this makes the program OS independent of course.
Why I really would suggest to take the time to learn use StatET efficiently (cauction: very subjective list!):
be able to run your code really fast and easily with comfigurable shortcuts (by Ctrl+r by default),
thanks to the script editor and running environment is heavily integrated, debuging and reviewing your code cannot be easier,
configurabled environments by default (e.g.: R scripts),
you may define templates for frequent commands and those's environment (e.g.: loop, if conditions etc),
highly customizable syntax highlight,
TeXlipse integrated to view and edit tex code with ease (LaTeX support for Eclipse),
Roxygen support for literate programming (very handy at package development to automatically generate Rd files (manuals) from inline comments),
easily extendable with othet Eclipse plugins (e.g.: spell checking, (SQL) database management, image viewer, running external programs like Sweave).
A nice guide to read is A Guide to Eclipse and the R plug-in StatET by Longhow Lam.
Gedit + RGedit plugin + Snippets plugin
You've suggested eclipse; there is a plugin called StatEt which work quite well (even Sweave is supported!).
There is a KDE 4 based IDE called RKward. It's nice because of:
Workspace Browser
Integrating the R console
data.frames editor
Syntax colored editor
GUI frontend for installing CRAN packages
For my case, I would recommend RKward for linux, it is a KDE. I've been using RStudio in Windows, but when I switched to Ubuntu, I find RKward easy to use, and has a good interface.
You can create a data frame without coding it with data.frame() function.
If you are used to Eclipse, StatET (mentioned by mbq) is probably the right choice for you.
That being said I have a more exotic choice to offer that you might want to consider, if you like auto suggestion and pure syntax highlighting is not enough for you. At least for me auto completion of R-Code did not work with StatET.
Now I use Komodo Edit with Sciviews-K and R64. Sending Code from editor to R works really well and the editor offers auto-completion for R-Code which is really nice – in particular if you are new to R. I work on a Mac, but it should be easy to setup for Linux too.
I think it has lost some popularity because it wasn't to stable in the past, but at I feel it's much better now and it hardly crashes in my setup. So you might wanna give it a chance too.
EDIT: If you work on Mac Textmate with the corresponding R bundle might be interesting, too. Recently I am about to switch to Textmate. If you don't care about the $45 for textmate, it's probably the most stable choice I tested so far. But it's only available on a Mac. But hey I am really amazed by this editor (and as you can see I like testing setups ;).
EDIT: I realize this thread is still being read by someone, so I definitely need to mention RStudio. It came out of nowhere and quickly became the choice of a lot of people. And it's well deserved. It still has some bugs (like not being able to stop RSessions) but it has tremendous auto-complete with context help. But at least on my setup (Mac) it's more stable than StatET / Eclipse. Sweave and ROxygen is not really supported yet, but the developers are very active. Definitely worth trying.
EDIT II: Because it's fun to track this here's another edit. RStudio continues to win more and more users. The combination of RStudio, Roxygen2 and particularly knitr integration has likely been the largest contribution to this development. While Rstudio was rather used by applied users and in teaching and has improved to dramatically that there's isn't many situations in which another IDE / editor is a better choice. Being maried to ESS seems like to only valid reason left to not use it. Also the documentation of its ecosystem is just great. The latest: Package development by Hadley http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/description.html and his advanced programming http://adv-r.had.co.nz/
I strongly recommend learning emacs+ess, but for a more modern-looking interface you can try RKward: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rkward/index.php?title=Main_Page.
I use Geany in combination with R. Geany provides a terminal in which one can start an R session and shortcuts an be defined in order to send highlighted text to the terminal.
www.geany.org
RGedit, great tool if you're keen on GNOME default text editor. Lacks autocompletion in script mode, though... but you can define snippets in a separate plugin (Snippets)... You can send code directly to R session running in the terminal window, tabbed multiple R sesions, there are several GUI templates for common data analysis (t-test, correlation), long story short, take a look at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rgedit/
Few months ago (when I gave my blogging skills a try), I wrote a review for RGedit, here's a link (and a little bit of self-advertising):
http://psy-stat.com/?p=12
EDIT:
Oh, and you can use Geany and set it up so you can send code chunks to R session... I've never done it, but I know it's manageable!
EDIT #2:
here's a helpful link: http://sgsong.blogspot.com/2010/08/integrating-r-with-geany.html
This might be what you're looking for. It integrated Komodo and the SciViews package. I found it a bit too fiddley (I prefer vi) but if you're looking for a full blown IDE/editor for R in Linux it's pretty close to Tinn-R for Windows and it's written by the same guys!
Link:
http://www.sciviews.org/SciViews-K/index.html
Rattle: http://rattle.togaware.com/
Emacs with ESS. Probably not as polished as Eclipse, but I do like it.
Personnaly, I use gedit and my console. It works great :)