From: Joost Diepenmaat <joost@...>
Date: 2005-04-28T22:53:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and IDE

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 09:55:04PM +0900, Thomas Kirchner wrote:
> * On Apr 28 17:45, Lothar Scholz (ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org) wrote:
> > No they do not. I'm really surprised how hostile some ruby developers
> > are against IDE's and tool support.

My main problem with IDE's is that they take up too much resources 
(screen, memory and time) - and I haven't seen one that offers
significant benefits for dynamic languages. I occasionally use eclipse
for java refactoring jobs (moving classes, conversion of method
signatures etc), but:

1. you can't do perfect static analysis on a dynamic languge, so providing
   all the cool stuff that eclipse provides for java is much more difficult
   or impossible to do correctly for ruby.

2. there is far less boiler-plate code in ruby and perl, so I don't 
   need it as much.

> > Until now the community is still very dominated by
> > technical geeks which is not a good thing.

Since I am a technical geek, even though I'm new to Ruby, I don't mind 
this at all :-)

> Just to chime in my opinion... I'm not "hostile" to IDEs, I've given them 
> a shot.  The biggest sticking point for me is a good IDE would need to 
> have a vim text-editing part.  Customizable key bindings or vi-like 
> behavior wouldn't be enough, it would need vim embedded.  Until this is 
> accomplished, an environment just could not be productive for me - as 
> said in another thread, it's a life changing editor ;)

Plugging in vim would help, yeah.

> > t> 4/ autocompletion
> > Difficult in a dynamic language like ruby. We discussed this to death
> > in the past. Please use google.
> 
> Obviously, this is incredibly difficult for ruby.  However, when I've 
> used IDEs in the past, this was exactly what I appreciated most.  I think 
> it'd be possible to get some basic autocompletion, skipping some of the 
> more difficult dynamic elements, and most people would be happy, if not 
> content.

To do this correctly (for some values of correct), you'd probably have to 
introspect the running code. I gather that some SmallTalks do this - 
I've never used smalltalk but it appears to me that this is very different 
way of programming than I'm used to - like building programs in an 
interactive shell.

> > t> 5/ probably many others I don't remember now.
> > Many many others. And everybody has its own preference, some only want
> > a debugger but there they want the best one, for others a profiler would
> > be the most important and there are people who would not accept anything
> > if it does not look like a Smalltalk image.
> 
> I think the most important feature(s) for me, and many others when they 
> think about it, is stability and speed. 

Yup. Any editor that can't keep up with my typing speed / menu selection is 
too slow. Anything that isn't rock-stable isn't worth using.

Joost.