From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2004-05-14T00:47:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby productivity question


On May 13, 2004, at 10:28, Its Me wrote:
>     In terms of net productivity at the end of the day/month/year,
>     how does developing in Ruby without a rich set of integrated
>     development tools compare to developing in (say) Java with the
>     full set of tools provided by (say) Eclipse?
>
> I think of "Net productivity" as some combination of how quickly I can 
> have
> a solid-enough solution to a medium sized problem, and how effectively 
> I can
> evolve that solution over time.

Interesting question, but I think it contains some assumptions that 
might be questioned.

When I develop larger Ruby applications (10,000+ lines), I just use an 
editor, one that has the ability to execute shell commands. So, a 
development cycle is typically

1. Edit a few lines
2. Write a test
3. Hit F11 to run all the tests
4. if (rand < .9) go back to 1
5. Try out the application
6. Goto 1

If it's a web application, then step 5 basically means hitting refresh 
on the browser session I leave running: my checked out CVS directory 
will be symlinked into Apache's tree, so I just run the code I'm 
editing.

The only think I miss from an IDE is the ability to check the callers 
of a method: I have to run grep from inside my editor to do that.

I haven't used a debugger in 5+ years, so I'm not sure what I'm missing 
that would make me more productive in an IDE. The last time I went on a 
serious Ruby coding streak, I churned out 35kloc in 6 weeks.


Cheers

Dave