From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-08-27T12:26:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Why Ruby does not nead an ide

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Where I think an IDE is absolutely crucial is two places:
> 
> 1. Dealing with large quantities of other peoples' code

Amen. All the arguments about code being equally easy to manipulate if 
you follow good conventions and clean design without an IDE are 
completely void in the "fix a pile of hacks a student coder learning the 
language was allowed to let loose into a production system" scenario.

These scenarios are also unfortunately very common, and usually done on 
time schedules of maintenance releases, where a full rewrite of a 
component that works is out of the question.

Most people argumenting in this topic that tool support isn't really 
necessary omit the worst-case scenario - having reliable and precise 
code navigation and refactoring in these is invaluable as you don't have 
to tiptoe around someone else's mess and reread your changes three times.

David Vallner