From: Richard Conroy Date: 2007-02-14T20:58:05+09:00 Subject: Re: Where do you use Ruby? On 2/14/07, Robert Dober wrote: > Eclipse hmm, good question. > > I recall that there was a recent thread with a very good pointer to > why some tools work great with Java and C# and not so great with > highly dynamic languages. > Not surprisingly after all. Basically static typing means that you can make intellisense and method prediction work easily, as those languages are deterministic. Ditto with refactoring. IIRC one of the Ruby-in-Visual Studio projects (the main one, name escapes me -Steel? , apologies to those concerned) made a big point about this - that they basically had to run a ruby interpreter in the background to know what types were actually being used in a particular scope, vs what types could be used. A considerable challenge, and they are still not deterministic. > Just imagine what you know about the methods of an object in Java just > by parsing the code and what you know about the methods of an object > in Ruby just by parsing the code! By code parsing in Ruby, you can basically enumerate the methods and their argument lists, thats it. > It basically boils down that you loose some of the functionalities of > Eclipse when using with ruby. I tried it and I really thought it was > not worth the effort. *Nods* - at its core, the eclipse ruby plugins boil down to being an editor + project view. If you got mixed source projects (Java web stuff + WATIR web tests) you retain some utility, and Windows users don't have a lot of real options wrt Ruby tools, which does artificially inflate the case for eclipse. RadRails deserves a lot of attention, but what is good for Rails development isn't always good for pure Ruby development. > But if you are already using Eclipse you might still find it the best > way to manage your ruby projects of course. Well we already use eclipse, and find eclipse insufficient for managing Ruby projects. I don't expect it to stay that way, but for now my ruby tools are a bit stone age.