In a world gone mad..

I just stumbled upon this: Sapphire In Steel/. A Ruby IDE for Visual Studio 2005. Of course there are other alternatives like for example TextMate, JEdit, SciTe, Arachno, ActiveState, Mondrian, etc.. lots of choices.. different levels of Ruby support/integration.. from editor with highlighting to integrated ruby debugging..

Anyway, Ruby is not Java. Duh. :) What I’m saying is what many before already said: Many of the IDE features that make a Java developer’s live bearable won’t work very well or at all in a Ruby context. However, you also simply don’t need them in Ruby.

What’s nice to have, of course, is syntax highlighting and context-sensitve word-completion. The latter however, may very well be restricted to the context of the opened file. It doesn’t even have to check the ‘require’d files. What use would it be in a language like Ruby? Think BlankSlate for example.. An IDE would have to really execute code to know what’s going on.. Well, nothing new. The old dilemma of highly dynamic languages.

But again: You just don’t need theses features with Ruby.

I would even go as far as saying that you don’t need a debugger. A debugger is an undisciplined developer’s saviour. Nothing more. I developed quite a few systems. The only time I needed the debugger was back in my Amiga days when writing demos. In M68k assembler.. But a Java debugger? Or a Ruby debugger? What does it tell you about your codebase if you need a debugger to figure out what’s going wrong? Even when developing for Symbian applications and games I never really needed a debugger.. And believe me when I tell you that Symbian development is a real bitch..

(Well, of course there are certain situations.. like being dependant on certain assumptions you make about a library for example.. even then a test suite is a viable alternative.. this might change on a more hardware-near level.. but then again you probably need an oscilloscope anyway.. :)

Anyway, even with Ruby highlighting in VS2k5 or IDEA or JEdit, etc.. I still fall back to using a small and fast editor like TextPad. Maybe my next pet project should be a new text editor.. :) With exactly the features I want.. Unfortunatly this would mean going back to C/C++.. I still don’t consider a Java, C# or Ruby/Python/etc editor a really convincing alternative.. Which I should probably explain in another post..

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 1:33 pm under Development, Rant, Ruby
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