From: Kev Jackson <kevin.jackson@...>
Date: 2005-11-08T11:47:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Investigating Ruby - key limitations ?


>   4. Poor development enviroments compared to .NET/Java - however this
>is slowly getting better - f.x. RDT is quite useful.
>
>  
>
Ah the old chestnut - no IDE, it can't be used in the 'enterprise'.  
Programming Ruby with notepad/vi/vim/emacs is perfectly possible.  
Instead of intellisense, actually *read* the docs and learn what methods 
and properties are available.  I've used VisualAge and more recently 
Eclipse and the only thing that I'd say was absolutely superb about 
Eclipse is the refactoring support.  In general I know the standard API 
well enough that the intellisense feature slows me down as it seems to 
match the first character (and it frequently gets it wrong), and it's a 
major pain when it pops up and you have to disrupt your typing to 
dismiss it.

A ruby refactoring tool (lefactoring...) would be brilliant, but apart 
from that IDE's really don't provide you with as much as you think.  
Someone over at Microsoft recently wrote about how VisualStudio rots 
your (coding)brain and I can only agree, since working on ruby (with 
gvim/Scite), I feel like I'm actually thinking through the problems and 
fixing them myself, instead of being led by the nose in Eclipse 
everytime I type a .

YMMV...

but this is not a reason to dismiss ruby just yet.

FYI Komodo from activestate has recently added ruby support, the windows 
beta version is available for download, I may look at it at some point

>For more info see my blog at:
>http://mortench.blogspot.com/2005/11/investigating-ruby.html
>  
>
Kev