From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2005-04-30T04:04:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and IDE

(Second try. Sorry about the first, folks.)

> Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> I don't think that many people have found the heavyweight nature
>> of an IDE to be beneficial to Ruby development. This may change.
> I find the keybindings to syntactic-based code-navigation and
> refactorings in modern Java editors very beneficial to
> development. Implemented properly this feels quite natural and
> "lightweight". I'd like to see the same features in Ruby editors.

Refactoring in Ruby is a slightly different beast. (Well, truth be
told, it's a majorly different beast. I tend to be able to refactor
my code with simple :%s/oldname/newname/g). That said, the problem
of refactoring is being worked on, and it should (hopefully) be
independent of any IDE.

>> Ruby will screw things up for just about any IDE with the mere
>> existence of #method_missing.
> Programmers may find features like "type-based code-completion" and
> "find declaration" are still valuable, even if these features don't
> know about messages handled in #method_missing.

Type-based code completion is the very thing that will NOT work in
Ruby. It *can't*. The best you can get is a "statistically likely"
code completion that may break under a lot of circumstances.

Find declaration could be useful ... but, again, depends on type
information that is only available at runtime.

>> I don't use an IDE in Ruby -- even for some big projects that I'm
>> working on -- because I don't *need* an IDE in Ruby. ... Ruby
>> doesn't *need* an IDE.
> We don't have a syntactic-based editor for Ruby yet. I think for
> anyone who's used one for Java will tell you they definitely
> *need* it for development. Perhaps the same will be true for Ruby
> in the future ...

Doubtful, at least for the near future. Don't get me wrong -- Ruby
will benefit from certain IDE efforts. The inclusion of ri
information will be very useful if you can do that in the jedit Ruby
plugin. I have been playing with jedit and while I don't find it
nearly as usable as vim (long experience), it is an impressive
editor and I support what you're doing with the plugin.

But an IDE is very different.

IMO, a good Ruby IDE will support debugging; have ri and rdoc
information easily and quickly available, and that's about it.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca