use Perl

Sepia aims to make Emacs the kind of interactive development environment for Perl that it already is for Emacs Lisp. This involves a number of components:

• Interactive evaluation: Supports both a REPL and a scratch buffer. The REPL uses the Perl debugger hooks to allow breakpoints and recovery from die, and Devel::LexAlias to inspect and change lexicals.
• Source navigation: Finds definitions, callers, and callees. This is supported by querying the running Perl process rather than through PPI.
• Documentation: Displays minibuffer documentation (eldoc) for builtins and some user functions, and supports POD browsing.
• Completion: Completes variable, function, and module names based on the running Perl process.

Not having used Devel::PerlySense, I won't try to make a detailed comparison, but my impression is that Devel::PerlySense is geared toward off-line development (uses PPI, has a class browser, etc.), while Sepia is geared toward on-line development (supports interaction, value inspection, debugging). So give both a try, and see which style suits you best.

I want a function to take the mean of some data:

Hm.... I want to ignore NaN and Inf sometimes; I'll add a flag for it:

But I may also want to trim outliers; I'll use keyword arguments:

Whoa, this is getting complicated; I'll make it an Object:

OMG, no encapsulation, I'll make accessors:

But now I have to do this just to do a simple mean:

I know, I'll create a little language for means:

Then I can write in the domain terminology, and taking the mean is easy:

...and thus we see how "writing interfaces that don't suck" became "creating little languages."

So I need something to kill time during the debates and further
increase my level of frustration. Safari doesn't have a saved
sessions. Let's try a bit of applescript...

tell application "Safari"
        set urls to URL of every document
        -- tbd: how do I write a file in AS?
end tell


No love -- this only saves the first tab of each window. Curse.
Google around a bit. Curse a bit more when I find out what's
involved, and when I can't make the cut-and-paste code to write a file
work...

#!/usr/bin/env perl

sub osascript($)
{
        my $cmd = shift;
        local *O;
        open O, "|osascript > /tmp/osa.$$";
        $cmd =~ s/\n/\r/g;
        print O $cmd;
        close O;
        open IN, "/tmp/osa.$$" or die $!;
        unlink "/tmp/osa.$$";
        return split /\r/, join '', <IN>;
}

sub get_docs
{
        osascript <<'END';
tell application "System Events"
        set urls to {}
        tell process "Safari"
                repeat with w in every window
                        tell w
                                repeat with b in every radio button
                                        click b
                                        tell application "Safari"
                                                set urls to urls & (URL of first document)
                                        end tell
                                end repeat
                        end tell
                end repeat
        end tell
        set old_delim to AppleScript's text item delimiters
        set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return
        set urls to urls as text
        set AppleScript's text item delimiters to old_delim
        urls
end tell
END
}

sub restore_docs
{
        my $docthing = '{'.(join ',', map { qq{"$_"} } grep $_, @_).'}';
        osascript <<END;
tell application "System Events"
        set urls to $docthing
        tell application "Safari"
                repeat with u in urls
                        open location u
                end repeat
        end tell
end tell
END
}

@ARGV = grep $_,@ARGV; # wtf: quicksilver passes us an empty arg.
if (@ARGV) {
        $op = shift;
} else {
        $pf = "$ENV{HOME}/.safari-state";
        if ($0 =~ /safari-save(?:\.pl)?$/) {
                $op = 'save';
                open STDOUT, ">$pf" or die "$0: $pf: $!";
        } elsif ($0 =~ /safari-load(?:\.pl)?$/) {
                $op = 'load';
                open STDIN, $pf or die $!;
        } else {
                die;
        }
}

if ($op =~ /^s/) {
        print STDOUT "$_\n" for get_docs;
} elsif ($op =~ /^l/) {
        my @docs = map {chomp;$_} <STDIN>;
        restore_docs(@docs);
}
...add it to my Quicksilver path. Hack-tastic.