From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2005-02-19T18:59:45+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] FXIrb 0.14 - a Win32 GUI wrapper around IRB

Navindra Umanee <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
> 
> I somehow have this image of open source languages like
> Perl/Python/Ruby mostly thriving on the Unix platform.  I mean sure,
> there are Windows ports, but those are usually assumed to be
> second-rate.
> 
> I guess I shouldn't be so surprised.  Windows people have to hack
> software too.  I would imagine they would prefer more official
> development environments with fancy polished GUIs and the such, but
> hey why not Ruby.

The windows port of ruby is actually quite excellent, especially with
the one-click installer (thanks to everyone involved with that!).

I'm not too big a fan of the official development environment - we use
it at work, and some parts of it are great (the ability to easily
navigate a multithreaded stack trace, frinstance) while others are just
not to my taste. What I've ended up doing is editing using cygwin and
gvim, with ctags and glark for code navigation, and compiling and
debugging inside the visual studio IDE.

At home I dual boot, but I've been spending most of my time in Windows
lately for one very compelling reason - the fonts. Seriously, it's
easier to set up a unixish environment under windows than it is to get
decent looking small fonts under linux. And as Jamis noted, you can get
a lot accomplished from the command line these days, and  ruby
definitely helps with that.

martin