From: "Hal E. Fulton" Date: 2001-12-04T11:19:14+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:27402] Re: Killer app for Ruby developers? ----- Original Message ----- From: Sean Russell Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby To: ruby-talk ML ; Sent: Monday, December 03, 2001 6:42 PM Subject: [ruby-talk:27393] Re: Killer app for Ruby developers? > Hal E. Fulton wrote: > > > A browser-editor that can do basic > > refactoring (and maybe some source > > control functions). Should of course be > > scriptable in Ruby. Should have some > > kind of template or script support for > > Lapidary or RubyUnit or whatever. > > This is an interesting idea... you write tests, and the editor generates > method and class stubs as you go. Interesting. On the other hand, stuff > like this can get really annoying, in practice, really fast. :-) True. I'm a believer in high configurability. Automatic stuff should have a "switch to manual." > > Net-enable it for the purpose of... > roll please> remote pair programming! > .... > > Should have at least a chat box, maybe even > > voice, maybe even webcam. > > Yeah, this would be a requirement... otherwise, you aren't really pair > programming. Chat box might be distracting, but voice may be restrictive > for people still on <100k bandwidth. Even if your net connection is fast, your overall connection with the peer may not be... > > One problem: Do we settle on a fixed editor? > > Make it configurable? Give it "faces" that look > > like emacs or whatever? Not everyone agrees > > on the choice of editor. (I think my opinion is to > > have a "neutral ground" editor.) > > This was the one thing that always (and still does, to some extent) scared > me about XP. I dread going somewhere that makes me use Visual Age (or some > such) just because its their "standard". You can argue that it is easy to > adopt a programming style, but editor choice is pretty personal. I started > with Emacs, then vi, then Visual Age, Slick Edit, jEdit, ad nauseum... > they're all useable, but in the end, I went back to vi. Even with all of > the "features" of the full IDEs, I'm still faster, and much prefer, vi. > > Still, you should be able to separate the model from the view, and have > user-defineable interfaces. They don't even have to be the same for a pair > at a time, if the pair only shares the *data*. Actually, a better solution > may just to be to pair-enable some existing editors :-) I agree it's sad when you have to learn Yet Another Editor. Sharing "data only" is a good idea; BUT: 1. The observing partner needs to see the editing happening in realtime; 2. Ideally, it should be possible to switch quickly between partners (i.e., one backspaces over a word and replaces it with something else). Governed by etiquette rather than software (just like access to a physical keyboard). Pair-enabling an existing editor is an interesting idea... I'd like that if the interface were well-defined and we could (partly) treat the editor as a black box... Hal