From: "Molitor, Stephen L" <Stephen.L.Molitor@...>
Date: 2006-09-08T04:11:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Thousands of words on Ruby

James,

What do you do for 'rename method' in TextMate?  I'm aware of the search
and replace in file feature but I was wondering if there was something
better.

Nice write-up by the way.  Ruby IDEs might not do all that Eclipse or
NetBeans does for Java, but they're not as primitive as Tim made them
out to be!  I was also surprised that he hadn't tried Builder.

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: James Edward Gray II [mailto:james@grayproductions.net] 
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 9:22 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: Thousands of words on Ruby

On Sep 6, 2006, at 4:40 PM, Tim Bray wrote:

> I just finished a much-too-long series of essays on Ruby from a whole 
> bunch of angles, some here might enjoy it: http:// 
> www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/08/17/JRuby

I found it interesting reading.  It really felt like early explorations
of the language.  Here are some random thoughts I had while reading:

* There are multiple places to get XML escaping from the standard  
library, but since you are familiar with REXML I'll recommend:   
REXML::Text.normalize("Some &amp; text &lt; foo &gt; \" bar")

* I really like that Ruby leaves the power to decide where to store code
in our hands.  Just to give random example of how this is cool,  
I purposefully keep my FasterCSV library in one long source file.   
When I'm working on some project and need to work with CSV, I drop the
file in vendor/ and I'm all set.

* http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/2006/06/13/do-i-need-these-
parenthese

* A DSL is slightly more than method calls without parentheses.  The
idea is to adapt your language to the problem domain, so the solution is
very naturally expressed in the language of the problem.

* For markup generation:  have you tried Builder?

* The "helper methods" referred to in the quoted Markaby documentation
are a Railsism.  I suspect that's why you had trouble understanding the
quote.

* I mean this in the nicest possible way, of course, but you're dead
wrong about that IDE thing.  ;)  I have a solution for each point you
listed in TextMate and I would be shocked if you can't do similar things
in emacs (the editor I believe you are using).  I'm happy to post them,
if there's interest.

* I'm looking forward to your Unicode talk.  Just remember to start it
with, "Ruby supports Unicode today."  ;)  It really, really bugs me that
everyone claims Ruby has no Unicode support.  Don't be like them.  As
long as you get off to a good start like that, I'll be very interested
in the rest of your talk and I won't lead the lynch mod your essay hints
at.

James Edward Gray II