vesterberg.se

In a project recently I have used Ruby to build a prototype. The production version was done in Java. Why? Because the customer wanted it. One thing I definitively miss when working in Ruby is an IDE as powerful as Eclipse for Java. All the refactorings, the code completion and debugging facilities enhances my productivity. I used Ruby plugin RDT for Eclipse. The more dynamic a language is, the more it helps if the IDE keeps track of the relationsships and inheritance between your program parts. The earlier you discover your errors the better.

Smalltalk is/was very dynamic and had a great IDE. In fact the IDE was integrated into the language from scratch. Why doesn’t Ruby have a similar powerful IDE already? One of the reasons I can think of, is that Smalltalk had it’s IDE from scratch, but Ruby started more like a file-oriented script-language.

So far I have tried Komodo, which is to slow to be useful and Radrails/RDT, which still is missing reasonable debugging facilities. Arachno had a corrupt installation exe when I last tried to install. So I stayed with RDT.