AutoIt best practices / coding style

AutoIt developers want to make sure that any functions written in AutoIt that are part of the core library (in short: UDFs) are subject to a certain code style. You can find this standard here: http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/udfs/UDF_Standards.htm Many programmers in the community write all AutoIt code in this standard.

On the subject of IDE. SciTE is a time-tested code editor, but as IDE it performs adequate. There are two other IDEs which are developed and maintained by the community:

• A graphical debugger (F10 step next functionality) http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/21834-graphical-autoit-debugger/

• ISN AutoIt studio http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/136766-isn-autoit-studio/

The last one is fairly new, but it looks extremely promising and it may work better for your project.

Finally, I have a note of warning. You say "OOP principles are hard to apply", but even as an OO programmer you should have a strong core idea of how to write non-OO code before you even learned OOP. Most OO languages are imperative at their core, so you should be an excellent imperative coder already. AutoIt is imperative as well.

A useful IDE will not solve your problems! But it will make them slightly easier to manage.

I don't know where you heard that AutoIt only performs well for scripts for under 500 lines, but every time you #include one of the default libraries you are adding ~10000 lines of code. If you can write proper code, you will build your own libraries without adding complexity to the rest of your code.