"William Crawford" <wccrawford / gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:78392af611b0461304d3a6f278cb140e / ruby-forum.com...
> unknown wrote:
>> 1: ruby is an efisiont clean languige that is digsined to minamize
>> boilerplate code
>


OK, let me say up front that (for, perhaps, obvious reasons) I have very 
strong views on IDEs. ;-)

If you want to find a tersely expressed language, you need look no further 
than Smalltalk. Then look at the Smalltalk IDE. This is built from the 
ground up to support the language - editing, browsing, debugging, 
evaulating, inspecting, navigating the code. The Smalltalk language is an 
intrinsic part of its IDE.

Now look at the way that Smalltalk code is structured. Typically it has lots 
of classes with many 'levels' of descent. Each class has many methods that 
rely upon ancestor classes. The code in any one method is often just 1 or 2 
lines long. A really long method may be 10 lines or so long.

Now look at Ruby code. In my experience, most Ruby coders write big classes 
with very few ancestors. Moreover, Ruby methods are typically (by comparsion 
with Smalltalk) huge. In my view, this style of coding is relatively verbose 
and takes little advantage of the real benefits of OOP.

So why do people code Ruby (typically) in a more verbose manner than 
Smalltalk? In my view, this has nothing do do with the language itself and 
everything to do with the environment. Lacking a really good IDE, Ruby makes 
it hard to navigate the class hierarchy, to find the methods of ancestors 
and derive new methods from them. So people do a lot of unnecessary 
recoding. If Ruby had a Smalltalk-like IDE, I am sure that people would 
rapidly start coding in a much terser style taking greater advantage of the 
ancestor/descendent relationship of classes.

best wishes
Huw Collingbourne

http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby Programming In Visual Studio 2005