From: John Gabriele <jmg3000@...>
Date: 2006-04-30T09:41:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby & Emacs

[fixed top-posting]

On 4/29/06, Eric Armstrong <Eric.Armstrong@sun.com> wrote:

> Paul Legato wrote:
> > SleepJunk13 wrote:
> > > Is there a standard IDE out there that most people use? I'm looking at
> > > Mondrian and Arachno now, but I'm not sure which. I'm also looking at
> > > FreeRIDE as well, but I don't know.
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > If you're serious about programming, I recommend you take some time to
> > try them all. Try Emacs for a few days, try vi or vim for a few days,
> > try the demos of the commercial editors, try Eclipse FreeRIDE and the
> > other free IDEs... It's really a matter of personal choice and taste
> > more than anything else, and trying a bunch of editors yourself is the
> > only way to figure out which one suits you best.
> >
> > Best,
> > Paul
>
> Hmm. The only thing that turned me off to Emacs was the
> weird command names--and probably the lisp-ness, had I
> gotten close enough to it to get into that.
>
> Which gets me thinking...
>
> Ruby is Lisp-like...Emacs is based on Lisp...
> There really ought to be an editor based on Ruby...

I believe FreeRIDE is written in Ruby, as are the plug-ins you might
write for it.

> ...it could start with new user interface semantics
>     that adhere to the standards that have evolved
>     over the last 35 years
>
> ...that would make it easy to use right from the start
>
> ...it could use Ruby, and be extended with Ruby, so
>     it could be customized and evolved using the
>     rather terrific language that Ruby is
>
> So much to code, so little time...
> :_)

Again -- I think more good things should be happening with FreeRIDE in
the near future, especially after the wxRuby rewrite is done (and
there's been good progress on that front lately).