From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2002-11-06T02:24:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Thoughts on Ruby lack of IDE

Brad Cox wrote:
> It is a sign of my hybrid Objective-C background, no doubt, but I
> don't find Ruby's hybrid nature at all disturbing. Language purists
> are free to disagree.
>
> What does seem like substantial deficiency is the absence of a real
> integrated development environment for Ruby. The early Smalltalk
> articles were quite specific that this is the main reason for its
> productivity.

Please check out FreeRIDE at http://www.rubyide.org

FreeRIDE has some pretty lofty goals. We've got quite a ways to go, but we
have a solid foundation in place in which we can build out the IDE with
modular plugins.

We tried very hard to get a first release out by Nov 1 for the Ruby
Conference, and we almost made it. The version in CVS currently works very
well under Linux, but we still have one last problem work out with the
debugger under Windows. We hope to have tarballs and zip files available for
download within a couple weeks (the CVS version is always available).

Curt

> What isn't clear the extend of coupling between simplicity of the
> language and the IDE implementation, learing GUI portability issues
> aside. Look at Java IDEs for example; they are HUGE, whereas
> Smalltalk+IDE was reasonably small.
> --
>
> Brad Cox, PhD; bcox@virtualschool.edu 703 361 4751
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