Ruby and IDE

ruby-talk
1

Hi!

I expect that this topic to have been discussed way to many times on the ml, so I would like to
excuse me for re-opening it.

I am doing Java development for quite a while (since 98) and lately with all the news around Ruby I
have started lookin' in. I see a lot of movement around, many great ideas and a lot of efforts going
in.

But, there is one 'little' aspect that bugs me. Imo, the tools around a language will take it from a
'niche' and transform it to an 'big success'. While I see a lot of nice ideas put into different
type framework, I cannot see any big effort going to an IDE.
I am seeing some of them around:
- Ruby support in vim
- Ruby support in Emacs
- Mondrian Ruby IDE
- FreeRIDE
- Arachno Ruby (I feel this is the only one going to the right direction ;-)),

but none of them are at a level comparable with real IDEs (being them IDEs for Java, Python,
C/C++/C#, etc). I am wondering why aren't the Ruby community considering this an important aspect?

[intermezzo]
A few months ago Cedric Beust (http://beust.com) and myself (http://themindstorms.blogspot.com) have
launched a new unit-integration testing framework. We had good reviews right from the start, but
after launching an Eclipse plugin, the feedback was just 'great'.
[/intermezzo]

I have run through different Ruby books and currently I wanted to start looking more deeply. As my
time doesn't allow me too much research, I 'gems' installed a few simple distros just to look at 'em
and see Ruby at work. But working with vim (and I did a lot of Java dev, back in time) seems to me
deprecate (sorry, I don't want to start a flame - it is just an opinion). I have never been able to
use Emacs decently (this is probably only my fault), FreeRIDE is not there for me and only Arachno
seems promising to me (not an affiliate of Arachno :wink: - unfortunately commercial product and I
don't thing any guy starting with Ruby will jump to buy it, even if this would be great for Mr.
Lothar Scholz).

What I would like to see:
1/ project management
2/ integrated documentation (API documentation)
3/ easy source code navigation (like go to declaration, implement this method, etc)
4/ autocompletion
5/ probably many others I don't remember now.

I would like to find out your opinion on this matter, from the point of more experienced Ruby
developers.

tia,
--:alex |.::the_mindstorm::.|

2

Hello the_mindstorm,

but none of them are at a level comparable with real IDEs
(being them IDEs for Java, Python,
C/C++/C#, etc). I am wondering why aren't the Ruby community
considering this an important aspect?

No they do not. I'm really surprised how hostile some ruby developers
are against IDE's and tool support. Especially some of the well known
oldtimers here in the group. Even when you point them to the benefits
in other IDE's, for example in the smalltalk area you get disgusting
comments. Until now the community is still very dominated by
technical geeks which is not a good thing.

One of the problems with writting an IDE is that it takes an enourmous
amount of time. You must expect 5 years minimum and Ruby is a new
language, at least in the western part of this world.

[intermezzo]
A few months ago Cedric Beust (http://beust.com) and myself
(http://themindstorms.blogspot.com) have
launched a new unit-integration testing framework. We had good
reviews right from the start, but
after launching an Eclipse plugin, the feedback was just 'great'.
[/intermezzo]

Same here.

use Emacs decently (this is probably only my fault), FreeRIDE
is not there for me and only Arachno
seems promising to me (not an affiliate of Arachno :wink: -
unfortunately commercial product and I
don't thing any guy starting with Ruby will jump to buy it,

Right i don't expect this either. Even when i see that the price is
not higher then a usual game and ruby is much more fun in the long
run.

1/ project management

Is done in Aracho.

2/ integrated documentation (API documentation)

Difficult with the current state of Ruby. We still lack a good
documentation standard. RDoc is one step but it misses so much
and is unclear in many others. The huge problem is that there is no
official API to the internal database, even the Seven-Click Installer
installs it wrong - the answer i got aobut this was:
Yes you are right, but it works. Yes it works but it is not good
if you want to build tools and other infrastructure on top of it.
This shows the whole state of the community at the moment and the
resulting problems.

3/ easy source code navigation (like go to declaration, implement this method, etc)

Time consuming, just because you must build a complete repository of
all accessible items. This must be robust and fast to search and the
whole concept does not work well with normal file level editors like
vi and emacs.

4/ autocompletion

Difficult in a dynamic language like ruby. We discussed this to death
in the past. Please use google.

5/ probably many others I don't remember now.

Many many others. And everybody has its own preference, some only want
a debugger but there they want the best one, for others a profiler would
be the most important and there are people who would not accept anything
if it does not look like a Smalltalk image.
And many people are asking about support for rails, they don't have
concrete ideas, they just want to see something for rails. Not easy
for someone like me.

···

--
Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com
CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's

3

We're not a craving bunch. Hacking in such a wonderful language is good
enough. :slight_smile:
No seriously, I dont't have the slightest. I guess the average rubyist
are quite satisfied with either vim or emacs.

4

the_mindstorm wrote:

But, there is one 'little' aspect that bugs me. Imo, the tools around a
language will take it from a 'niche' and transform it to an 'big success'.
While I see a lot of nice ideas put into different type framework, I
cannot see any big effort going to an IDE. I am seeing some of them
around: - Ruby support in vim
- Ruby support in Emacs
- Mondrian Ruby IDE
- FreeRIDE
- Arachno Ruby (I feel this is the only one going to the right direction
;-)),

Have a look at Eclipse with the ruby plugin, or KDevelop 3.2 as well.
Perhaps there should be a ruby IDE/dev tools FAQ.

5

Method auto-completion for the core Ruby types will be in the next
release of the Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit, hopefully out in the next
week. A documentation window will show next to the method list popup,
so this will be a great tool for those new to Ruby. Alex, Ruby Editor
Plugin pentru jEdit e cel mai bun*!
http://www.jedit.org/ruby/

What's missing from the Ruby IDE space is an editor let's you
manipulate Ruby at the syntax level. For Java, modern IDEs let me
think in terms like "method complete", "find declaration", "find
usages", "extract variable", "rename member", "extract method",
"change method signature", "go to last edit", "go to last location",
etc. jEdit's Ruby Editor Plugin is evolving into this style of IDE.

Not having to think about the more low-level textual manipulations
frees your mind to make syntactical ones; obviously important in a
verbose language like Java, but also of value to large-scale Ruby
development projects.

Cheers,
Rob

*Am lucrat pentru optspre luni in Timisoara. Stiu un pic Romaneste.

6

See, that's the problem. When you *can* use Emacs or vi decently, the need
for an IDE doesn't really seem to be there.

Here's the deal. When you're writing software in language Foo you want:

* An editor that is very good at editing text
* An editor that understands Foo
* An environment that allows you to do all the other tasks (debug, run,
integrate, copy files, check files into source control, ...)

If you're writing software in languages Foo, Bar, Baz and Smeg, you want:

* An editor that is very good at editing text
* An editor that understands Foo, Bar, Baz and Smeg
* An environment that allows you to do all the other tasks (debug, run,
integrate, copy files, check files into source control, ...)
* Ideally only one editor, so you don't have to context-switch all the
time, remembering that Ctrl-X is "exit" in one and "prefix-X" in the other

Emacs and vi are astounding at editing text. I doubt there's anything out
there that can do more. They also happen to have some pretty good support
for a whole lot of different languages.

Emacs is also very good at letting you do other tasks. I don't think
people use vi this way, they just use the commandline, but the commandline
is also very good at letting you do other tasks.

What does a typical IDE give you? It gives you an editor that isn't quite
as good as Emacs or vi at editing text. It gives you an environment that
is extremely good at managing a small subset of other tasks, but only the
ones the IDE designers anticipated, and it gives you extremely good
support for a small subset of languages.

If you take the time to learn Emacs and vi, you won't always have an editor
that is amazing at Foo, but you'll always have an excellent text editor,
and often one that is pretty good at Foo.

If there were an editor that was better than Emacs at editing Ruby code,
and as good as Emacs at everything else I use Emacs for... then I'd
switch. But switching to an editor that is slightly better for Ruby, but
not nearly as good at everything else just doesn't make sense to me.

Ben

···

On Thursday 28 April 2005 03:25, the_mindstorm wrote:

I have never been able to
use Emacs decently (this is probably only my fault), FreeRIDE is not

7

the_mindstorm wrote:
....

But, there is one 'little' aspect that bugs me. Imo, the tools around a language will take it from a
'niche' and transform it to an 'big success'. While I see a lot of nice ideas put into different
type framework, I cannot see any big effort going to an IDE. I am seeing some of them around:
- Ruby support in vim
- Ruby support in Emacs
- Mondrian Ruby IDE
- FreeRIDE
- Arachno Ruby (I feel this is the only one going to the right direction ;-)),

but none of them are at a level comparable with real IDEs (being them IDEs for Java, Python,
C/C++/C#, etc). I am wondering why aren't the Ruby community considering this an important aspect?

Provide specific examples of 'real IDEs'.

Remember that some IDEs like CodeForge already support Ruby. By IDE, did you mean

And there are programmer editors/ide with code-completion and class browser that support ruby. For example, see:

If you're wondering about GUI programming, I'd recommend using DialogBlocks 1.96 to design the GUI, export the GUI to xrc (xml rc) and use that from Ruby with wxRuby.

8

My current project (Java) size: aprox.2000 classes. I don't think this is nice manageable in a vim
environment (and remember I've been there ;-)).

I have seen this "vim or emacs is enough behavior", and I interpret it much like a: "hey if you are
not an elite to use vim/emacs, you have not the right to use xxx" (programming language for elites),
and this is _completely_ wrong. Imo this support is mandatory (I can give you lots of examples about
nice technologies/ideas that remained little - maybe even are dead now - because of the lack of tool
support).

I really believe (and I am sure almost all of you accept this :wink: ) that an IDE is helping a lot the
development of real world projects and it brings a lot of efficiency to experienced developers, but
is also helping beginners to become proficient.

Again, I will ask you to forgive my vehement position and I want to underline that I am not writing
this to start flames.

[Answer to Lothar:]
I am really enjoying Arachno and I intent to buy a license soon (even if .... - this will be a
personal mail ;-).

I am not saying that those features are easy/hard to support, as I am not an expert in programming
languages and also not an IDE guru developer. All I know is that even if the effort is big, the
reward will be bigger. I haven't mentioned features that are not available for example in Smalltalk.
Afaik Ruby is around since 2000, so the 5 years are gone ;-).

[Answer to Richard:]
- tried that too. Unfortunately, its offerings are the same as in other specified tools.

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Johan Toki Persson [mailto:tokikenshi@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 10:49 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: Ruby and IDE

We're not a craving bunch. Hacking in such a wonderful
language is good enough. :slight_smile: No seriously, I dont't have the
slightest. I guess the average rubyist are quite satisfied
with either vim or emacs.

9

No they do not. I'm really surprised how hostile some ruby developers
are against IDE's and tool support. Especially some of the well known
oldtimers here in the group. Even when you point them to the benefits
in other IDE's, for example in the smalltalk area you get disgusting
comments. Until now the community is still very dominated by
technical geeks which is not a good thing.

Just to chime in my opinion... I'm not "hostile" to IDEs, I've given them
a shot. The biggest sticking point for me is a good IDE would need to
have a vim text-editing part. Customizable key bindings or vi-like
behavior wouldn't be enough, it would need vim embedded. Until this is
accomplished, an environment just could not be productive for me - as
said in another thread, it's a life changing editor :wink:

> 3/ easy source code navigation (like go to declaration, implement
this method, etc)
Time consuming, just because you must build a complete repository of
all accessible items. This must be robust and fast to search and the
whole concept does not work well with normal file level editors like
vi and emacs.

Integrated documentation would be nice, but this would be even better
(after all, I've got my handy-dandy pickaxe, which is hard to beat). A
well-integrated resource for navigating full projects would be great, as
the solutions for vim aren't quite up to the level required, as far as
I've seen.

> 4/ autocompletion
Difficult in a dynamic language like ruby. We discussed this to death
in the past. Please use google.

Obviously, this is incredibly difficult for ruby. However, when I've
used IDEs in the past, this was exactly what I appreciated most. I think
it'd be possible to get some basic autocompletion, skipping some of the
more difficult dynamic elements, and most people would be happy, if not
content.

> 5/ probably many others I don't remember now.
Many many others. And everybody has its own preference, some only want
a debugger but there they want the best one, for others a profiler would
be the most important and there are people who would not accept anything
if it does not look like a Smalltalk image.

I think the most important feature(s) for me, and many others when they
think about it, is stability and speed. You should not be hampered by
your environment, whether through delays or crashes/bugs. When I tried
FreeRIDE a little while ago, it unfortunately couldn't pass this test.
The devs have made great progress, but it was still a bit slow and
unstable. (I should really give it another try now though, as they've
made new minor releases.)
Tom

···

* On Apr 28 17:45, Lothar Scholz (ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org) wrote:

10

Rob . said:

What's missing from the Ruby IDE space is an editor let's you
manipulate Ruby at the syntax level. For Java, modern IDEs let me
think in terms like "method complete", "find declaration", "find
usages", "extract variable", "rename member", "extract method",
"change method signature", "go to last edit", "go to last location",
etc. jEdit's Ruby Editor Plugin is evolving into this style of IDE.

AMEN! Everything you've mentioned above makes Eclipse such a powerful
boon to our Java development. For example, I can highlight any method or
field and hit F3 and instantly be taken to where that entity was declared,
in *any* included file. This is POWER.

Regarding Lothar's comment about this being time consuming...it's time
well spent. I've seen other IDEs for other languages handle this by
building a database of all includes on first run or on project creation,
and then giving the user the ability of rebuilding this database at will.
I'm happy to waste some time building and rebuilding this type of database
to gain these features. Please consider supporting the features Rob
mentions in ArachnoRuby...I've been very pleased with my evaluation so far
but the lack of these is a show stopper when considering an IDE purchase,
if that IDE doesn't endeavor to support them.

In reply to Rob, I'm curious why you've opted to go the jEdit route and to
not get involved with the RubyEclipse plugin. I'm a long time jEdit user
(have contributed a plugin as well:
http://sourceillustrated.com/jasperjedit\), but Eclipse IMHO has many of
the necessary scaffolding for the features you mentioned before already
there, while jEdit can be more of a pain to assemble just the right
plugins, etc. I personally would love to see more of a community effort
in regards to Ruby for Eclipse. jEdit is nice as an editor with IDE-like
features, but Eclipse is truly an IDE in every sense of the word.

Just my two cents.

Thanks,
John

11

Hello Ben,

Emacs and vi are astounding at editing text. I doubt there's anything out
there that can do more. They also happen to have some pretty good support
for a whole lot of different languages.

As a 10 year hardcore emacs user (and with my academic background in
user ergonomie) i think you are very wrong with this opinion.
Both are a little bit outdated and in many points there are now better
solutions.

Tomorrow i have to wait a few hours at the airport for my connect flight, maybe i'm
then in the right mood to participate in this religous war. Just to
set the first argument: Emacs is good text operating system, but it
lacks a good editor.

···

--
Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com
CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's

12

I am a little bit in the same boat. I regularly try Ruby editors/IDE.
But so far, they have not provided enough of an increase in features and
productivity that they justified to switch (and get used to a new
environment, work flow, key bindings, etc.). No religious thinking here,
the day I see a clear advantage in using an IDE for Ruby, I'll switch.
But for now Emacs does it for me.

That said, I sincerely hope great IDEs will emerge for Ruby.

Guillaume.

···

On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 04:43 +0900, Ben Giddings wrote:

On Thursday 28 April 2005 03:25, the_mindstorm wrote:
> I have never been able to
> use Emacs decently (this is probably only my fault), FreeRIDE is not

See, that's the problem. When you *can* use Emacs or vi decently, the need
for an IDE doesn't really seem to be there.

13

Sounds great Rob! jEdit is a wonderful editor, I've been using it for
the past 3 years and I just love it. The Ruby plugin for jEdit is
beautiful. For me this Ruby jEdit plugin and RDT for Eclipse are the
best of what I have seen thus far.

···

On 4/28/05, Rob . <rob.02004@gmail.com> wrote:

Method auto-completion for the core Ruby types will be in the next
release of the Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit, hopefully out in the next
week. A documentation window will show next to the method list popup,
so this will be a great tool for those new to Ruby. Alex, Ruby Editor
Plugin pentru jEdit e cel mai bun*!
Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit

What's missing from the Ruby IDE space is an editor let's you
manipulate Ruby at the syntax level. For Java, modern IDEs let me
think in terms like "method complete", "find declaration", "find
usages", "extract variable", "rename member", "extract method",
"change method signature", "go to last edit", "go to last location",
etc. jEdit's Ruby Editor Plugin is evolving into this style of IDE.

Not having to think about the more low-level textual manipulations
frees your mind to make syntactical ones; obviously important in a
verbose language like Java, but also of value to large-scale Ruby
development projects.

Cheers,
Rob

*Am lucrat pentru optspre luni in Timisoara. Stiu un pic Romaneste.

14

Thursday wrote:

By IDE, did you mean

And there are programmer editors/ide with code-completion and class
browser that support ruby. For example, see:

http://www.zeusedit.com/ruby.html

And with the following extra download Zeus will also do Ruby code
folding:

   Ruby lang spec - Zeus IDE

Jussi Jumppanen

15

Alex the_mindstorm Popescu wrote:

[Answer to Richard:]
- tried that too. Unfortunately, its offerings are the same as in other
specified tools.

I'm not sure what you mean here, which features in KDevelop were lacking?
Code completion isn't easy to do in ruby, but apart from that it has most
things on your list. I haven't used Eclipse, but I'd be interested in a
review of that for ruby development, such as how the debugger compares with
the other IDEs and so on.

16

> No they do not. I'm really surprised how hostile some ruby developers
> are against IDE's and tool support.

My main problem with IDE's is that they take up too much resources
(screen, memory and time) - and I haven't seen one that offers
significant benefits for dynamic languages. I occasionally use eclipse
for java refactoring jobs (moving classes, conversion of method
signatures etc), but:

1. you can't do perfect static analysis on a dynamic languge, so providing
   all the cool stuff that eclipse provides for java is much more difficult
   or impossible to do correctly for ruby.

2. there is far less boiler-plate code in ruby and perl, so I don't
   need it as much.

> Until now the community is still very dominated by
> technical geeks which is not a good thing.

Since I am a technical geek, even though I'm new to Ruby, I don't mind
this at all :slight_smile:

Just to chime in my opinion... I'm not "hostile" to IDEs, I've given them
a shot. The biggest sticking point for me is a good IDE would need to
have a vim text-editing part. Customizable key bindings or vi-like
behavior wouldn't be enough, it would need vim embedded. Until this is
accomplished, an environment just could not be productive for me - as
said in another thread, it's a life changing editor :wink:

Plugging in vim would help, yeah.

> > 4/ autocompletion
> Difficult in a dynamic language like ruby. We discussed this to death
> in the past. Please use google.

Obviously, this is incredibly difficult for ruby. However, when I've
used IDEs in the past, this was exactly what I appreciated most. I think
it'd be possible to get some basic autocompletion, skipping some of the
more difficult dynamic elements, and most people would be happy, if not
content.

To do this correctly (for some values of correct), you'd probably have to
introspect the running code. I gather that some SmallTalks do this -
I've never used smalltalk but it appears to me that this is very different
way of programming than I'm used to - like building programs in an
interactive shell.

> > 5/ probably many others I don't remember now.
> Many many others. And everybody has its own preference, some only want
> a debugger but there they want the best one, for others a profiler would
> be the most important and there are people who would not accept anything
> if it does not look like a Smalltalk image.

I think the most important feature(s) for me, and many others when they
think about it, is stability and speed.

Yup. Any editor that can't keep up with my typing speed / menu selection is
too slow. Anything that isn't rock-stable isn't worth using.

Joost.

···

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 09:55:04PM +0900, Thomas Kirchner wrote:

* On Apr 28 17:45, Lothar Scholz (ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org) wrote:

17

Johan Toki Persson [mailto:tokikenshi@gmail.com ]:
We're not a craving bunch. Hacking in such a wonderful language
is good enough. :slight_smile: No seriously, I dont't have the slightest. I
guess the average rubyist are quite satisfied with either vim or
emacs.

My current project (Java) size: aprox.2000 classes. I don't think
this is nice manageable in a vim environment (and remember I've
been there ;-)).

I'm working on a relatively large project in Ruby -- PDF::Writer.
This is not a small project in Ruby; it has between 40 and 60
classes and represents about six months continuous work. It also
uses a few other classes that I've refactored out.

ActionMailer (part of Rails) is similar -- it looks to be about 40
classes. (There's a lot of files that are 10k or less in
ActionMailer.)

I think that part of the reason that a lot of people are happy --
satisfied, even -- with vim and emacs for Ruby (and Rails)
development is that there's a lot *less* code.

How many of your 2000 classes are *useful* classes that do real
work? How many of your 2000 classes are necessary because of the
nightmare that is Java enterprise application programming? (When I
looked at "Code Generation in Action", I was amazed at how many
classes had to be generated for a single table/view combination.)

If, as I suspect, there's a 1:4 useful:framework ratio, then you're
talking about 400 classes that do real work. In PDF::Writer,
although I've got 40 - 60 classes (in about 35 files), I am working
mostly in -- get this -- three files. How many files do you work in
mostly? If your percentages are similar, then you're probably
working with about 35 files.

In a C++ project that I am doing at work, there's a similar ratio.
At any given time, I'm working with between three and fifteen files.
I will use the VisualStudio environment for code completion and a
few project-centric searches (it's a bit smarter than a text search
that I do on Windows, but equally smart to a good find-grep search
that I do on our Unix ports), and for integrated debugging, but
that's about it. I do 95% of my code editing in vim.

Interesting SLOCCount stats for PDF::Writer:
    Total SLOC : 5,980
    Person-Years Estimate (COCOMO) : 1.31 (15.69 months)
    Schedule Estimate (COCOMO) : 0.59 (7.12 months)
    Estimated Developers: : 2.21
    Estimated Cost: : $ 176,676

I have seen this "vim or emacs is enough behavior", and I
interpret it much like a: "hey if you are not an elite to use
vim/emacs, you have not the right to use xxx" (programming
language for elites), and this is _completely_ wrong. Imo this
support is mandatory (I can give you lots of examples about nice
technologies/ideas that remained little - maybe even are dead now
- because of the lack of tool support).

Then you are interpreting this incorrectly, at least for Ruby. You
can use any editor to work with Ruby. There is some support for Ruby
in the major cross-language IDEs, but Ruby is a notoriously
difficult language to provide full IDE capabilities for.

I really believe (and I am sure almost all of you accept this :wink:
) that an IDE is helping a lot the development of real world
projects and it brings a lot of efficiency to experienced
developers, but is also helping beginners to become proficient.

Mmmm. I don't necessarily agree. An IDE can help, certainly, with
things that are difficult to remember often. An IDE can also provide
an environment for bad code. In the Java world, an IDE is almost
certainly necessary to deal with the idiocies behind the library
design. In the MS world, an IDE is almost certainly necessary to
deal with the massive API set (and some of the idiocies behind the
library design).

In Ruby, I think that an IDE is much less necessary and useful. Code
completion is very unlikely to be possible on a Ruby IDE, at least
inasmuch as developers have come to expect with IDEs for statically
typed languages.

Can you point me to a Python IDE or three? I'd like to look at them
to see if they come close to what VisualStudio can do, even, for
C++.

-austin

···

On 4/28/05, Alex the_mindstorm Popescu <the_mindstorm@evolva.ro> wrote:
--
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca

18

John Wells wrote:

In reply to Rob, I'm curious why you've opted to go the jEdit route and to
not get involved with the RubyEclipse plugin.

I choose to write Ruby support for jEdit because:

1) It seemed the quickest way for me to implement the features I
wanted. I was familiar with jEdit from prior work on the XSLT and
XMLIndenter plugins.

2) The eclipse interface hasn't appealed to me. I prefer the
simplicity of the side-dockable windows in IntelliJ IDEA and jEdit, to
Eclipse's constraining view/perspective approach. I use IDEA for Java
development and jEdit for everything else.

3) Politically I find jEdit's GPL licensing terms more palatable to
Eclipse's and RubyEclipse's CPL licensing. If I contribute many hours
of my personal time to writing an free software Ruby editor based
heavily on others free software efforts, I don't want to license that
work under terms that allow a corporation to take it and release it
commercially.

Note that the GPL and CPL licenses are incompatible. So I can't just
take code from the RubyEclipse project and neither can they take my
code, unless we reach a separate licensing agreement.

4) I tend to back the underdog, often because it's the best. (Perhaps
that's why I was attracted to Ruby not Python or Perl, REST not SOAP,
and Topic Maps not RDF).

Slava started writing jEdit when he was 15 years old. I prefer to back
projects started by people solving problems, not projects started by
corporations for profit (assuming IBM started Eclipse with a
profit-motive in mind). Vendors and consortium's often produce
bloated, overly complex specifications and software, in order to
extract oligopoly profits from markets through consulting/support
revenues and by putting up technical and legal barriers to entry.

I don't expect anyone to agree with me. Hopefully if I write something
good, you'll use it. Maybe someone will even be able to help me by
writing a debugger. :wink:

Cheers,
Rob

19

In vim, I put the cursor over the method, hit ctrl-] and i'm taken to
where the method was defined. Thanks to my handy-dandy tags file!

···

On 4/28/05, John Wells <lists@sourceillustrated.com> wrote:

Rob . said:
> What's missing from the Ruby IDE space is an editor let's you
> manipulate Ruby at the syntax level. For Java, modern IDEs let me
> think in terms like "method complete", "find declaration", "find
> usages", "extract variable", "rename member", "extract method",
> "change method signature", "go to last edit", "go to last location",
> etc. jEdit's Ruby Editor Plugin is evolving into this style of IDE.

AMEN! Everything you've mentioned above makes Eclipse such a powerful
boon to our Java development. For example, I can highlight any method or
field and hit F3 and instantly be taken to where that entity was declared,
in *any* included file. This is POWER.

20

> Emacs and vi are astounding at editing text. I doubt there's

anything out

> there that can do more. They also happen to have some pretty good support
> for a whole lot of different languages.

I enjoy vi as part of a whole system.

gdb or ruby -rdebug for debugging. vi for editing. make and rake for
build automation. I assemble this small arsenal of tiny tools, and the
learning curve drastically shallows as I learn, because what works on
the shell works within vi (!!yourcommandhere), and the tools all work
together, because they have to, not out of explicit support for each
other.

Ari