From: Kev Jackson <kevin.jackson@...>
Date: 2005-09-30T12:00:52+09:00
Subject: Re: IBM vs. Microsoft vs. ... Ruby?


>there are 2 important things missing from Ruby right now: a fast VM and
>a good IDE. Until you have those you really cannot do "Enterprise
>Scale" applications.
>But maybe in the future.
>
>  
>
So far I've not been bitten by ruby being too slow, and the good IDE is 
nonsense.  Ruby is fairly easy to program with a text editor 
(vi/emacs/notepad etc).  Similar to the person banging on about not 
having a debugger - so?  I've been programming "enterprise" or rather 
server side Java code for 6 years and I've *never* opened a debugger.  
Debuggers are not as helpful as a well written unit test (Using TestUnit 
for ruby, JUnit for Java etc).

The first mistake new-comers to eclipse make is to open the debug 
perspective and to step through code - a complete waste of time instead 
of writing a unit test.

If you come from an environment where using a debugger in your IDE is 
common (corporate practice, VisualStudio seems to encourage it's use - 
VisualStudio does have a great debugger etc), then you may believe that 
without a good debugger and IDE ruby is not ready for the enterprise, 
but in my opinion debuggers are vastly overated, and only with bad specs 
(in Java land) do you really need an IDE (JSF sucks without tool support 
for example).

I'm also not exactly sure what enterprise means in this context - I 
think the most important parts missing from ruby right now are related 
to libraries (for messaging, ESB etc) rather than super IDE/dev tool 
support.

Kev