IDEs Especially Useful For Scripting Languages
When I switched from writing primarily C++ to writing primarily Python, I was immediately hit with the frustration of not having a compiler to catch my typing mistakes. This was especially frustrating early on in the Chandler project because the application took easily a minute to launch, after which you still needed to do something to execute your piece of code. Tests can help a lot, but without 100% path coverage you can still miss cases where your code tries to call a module that has not been imported yet, for example. It can also be hard to write unit tests, which are supposed to be fast, because you may need to create a whole test architecture to simulate networks, databases and so on.
When I found that the Pydev plugin for Eclipse integrates with Pylint, I was ecstatic. Pydev itself will inform you of syntax errors in a file, which is of course big help. But when you add on-the-fly Pylint checks, I found I could be confident that when I started long running tests or launched a slow application to do hands on testing myself, I would not be faced with the most frustrating trivial errors stopping me cold. Pylint is also pretty configurable so you can tweak it to suit your tastes. It is not foolproof, though, so good tests are still needed.
