at YAPC, this was one of the topics, people asked me about so will speak out here my truth about that subject.
at first: frankly I dont believe in competition, I really get easily outraged and I'm the person who don't like to spare with harsh words were appropriate.
That said, I'm pretty happy about Padre even I dislike the name, because it reminds me on stupid cargo cult religion through Rome. I like the effort because gabor gets things done and perl people deserve a good tool this or the other way and I already used some of his work to implement important feature in Kephra: an output panel, so you can run your scripts inside the editor. it will be inside the next, soon to be come testing release 0.3.10, 0.3.9.15 is already on CPAN.
But many people complain why so much duplicate work for 2 such similar projects. Yes their goals are very similar, even if I prefer different words to describe it, and the technology is almost the same (wxperl with scintilla and YAML::Tiny for config files). But the projects are different. I started 4 years ago and gabor some weeks. So he had naturally a difficult time to fit inside my grown project which he tried.
I believe the main differences are that gabor is much more pragmatic. He knows what tools he needs and goes the direct way to collect that. In order to that I consider him as a more heavyweight programmer than me, who still does not programming for living all the time and also still learning perl. I believe he can build up the long desired perl IDE in good software design and code quality, but I also believe there is more to it and that would much likely prefer to use Kephra over Padre.
We all use Perl and not Python because we are attracted to freedom and more the artist kind of way. And beside that, and why so many programmer try to write her own editor and if not use a higly customizable thing like vim, emacs or ultra edit? Because the editor is the most important tool for the programmer, its his living room which he like to decorate and arrange along his needs and likes.
because most editor prefer some ways to do it over others i started kephra, so that everybody could have (nearly) its own perfect editor. that was the primal goal. perl and the rest of it were a result of it. yes kephra was my first perl script. its rewritten several times and has still some crufty corners. (another point which may distract some people) but it has a way lot more feature than padre, a easy changeable keybinding, changeable menus, changeable commandlists and a extention API is currently building up.
yes we have UTF problems, linux problems and testing is still something im currently learning. (bought cromatics book at yapc). but these all high priority goals to me and up to now I always reached my high priority goals.
I have e designer in my team and try also to make thing beautiful, well engenered and that everything fits to the whole. that whats ment by the name kephra, which is egypt for heart which sits in the middle of the body and tries to connect everything to a larger entity.
so thats the way I see it. :)
