What I find odd about this discussion is that I remember the discussions 
in the Smalltalk and Java newsgroups soon after Java hit the scene where 
the Smalltalkers argued that the Smalltalk refactoring browser was an 
invaluable development tool that would be hard/impossible to develop in 
java due to the overcomplexity of its syntax.

What would you say is so much simpler/terser about Ruby than Smalltalk?

Personally I think every language would benefit from powerful and 
reliable refactoring tools and have found them extremely beneficial in 
managing large code bases. (fortunately various people in the Ruby 
community agree and are developing them, so thats ok ;-) ).

Tom

Austin Ziegler wrote:
> 
> 
> Which isn't what was said. So far, I have refactored thousands of
> lines of Ruby code with simple cut-and-paste operations, not with
> expensive, extensive tools.
> 
> -austin