Austin Ziegler wrote:
> I don't think that many people have found the heavyweight nature
> of an IDE to be beneficial to Ruby development. This may change.

I find the keybindings to syntactic-based code-navigation and
refactorings in modern Java editors very beneficial to development.
Implemented properly this feels quite natural and "lightweight". I'd
like to see the same features in Ruby editors.

> Ruby will screw things up for just about any
> IDE with the mere existence of #method_missing.

Programmers may find features like "type-based code-completion" and
"find declaration" are still valuable, even if these features don't
know about messages handled in #method_missing.

> I don't use an IDE in Ruby -- even for some big projects that I'm
> working on -- because I don't *need* an IDE in Ruby.
> ... Ruby doesn't *need* an IDE.

We don't have a syntactic-based editor for Ruby yet. I think for
anyone who's used one for Java will tell you they definitely *need* it
for development. Perhaps the same will be true for Ruby in the future
...

Rob
http://www.jedit.org/ruby/