From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2004-11-25T08:57:20+09:00
Subject: Re: editors/IDEs

Hello Felipe,

FMdO> If you ask me, one of the main obstacles to either newbies or people coming
FMdO> from languages such as Java and/or other static languages to the Ruby world
FMdO> is the lack of something like auto-completion in the tools they used to use
FMdO> and know where they came from, like IntelliJ and Eclipse.The evils of
FMdO> intelli-sense style technology :-)

FMdO> I know that given the dinaymic nature of Ruby it is very hard to do
FMdO> something like auto-completion, such was one topic some time ago here on the
FMdO> list, but what about some primitive completion like irb does?

Okay i will write an article about this over christmas, because i
spend a full week (fulltime + spare time) where i was doing nothing then
thinking about this intelli-sense problem, trying to find a heuristic
for adhoc analysis of ruby source code.

You can't compare irb with an editor when it comes to completion. They
are completely different worlds. In irb you can simply look at the
type of the variable you work with but this is easy to implement. But
in a text editor you have no hint except to look at the source
code.

As a homework assignment take a file from a standart library that you
dont now very well, remove all comments and then pick up some code
randomly and find out which type (or types) a vaiable at that place can
hold. Doing this, even with human intelligence is hard. After this try
to find computable rules about how you found it, then you will understand
the problem much better. It's just a 10 min excercise and a good way
to get a feel for ruby.

If you are allready an experienced ruby programmer take the file
"tk.rb" and try to do the same without asking Nobu.

There are some advanced features that may make it possible to give
better results (feedback analysis in a way modern profiler use it).
But these are very far away in the future.

-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's