On Jan 3, 7:46 pm, Giles Bowkett <gil... / gmail.com> wrote:

> > b) What is the status of available IDE's/debuggers for platforms such
> > as MacOS or Linux? Is there anything comparable to i.e. Eclipse?
>
> This is a hot topic but I **think** it only comes up because people
> who work in languages where tool support is vital assume tool support
> matters in Ruby. There's much less tool support in Ruby but I really
> think it's a supply/demand thing. It's very easy to build stuff for
> and in Ruby. If people really needed IDEs, we would probably have
> more. As far as I can tell the payoff for IDEs in Ruby is pretty
> marginal. I could be wrong. But there's a gazillion projects underway
> to make Ruby run faster and maybe one-and-a-half IDE projects. I think
> the only demand for tool support in Ruby comes from people who got
> used to it in other languages. Force of habit rather than actual
> necessity.

I believe that tooling is one of the important factors in what makes a
language "popular" with the code-writing masses. I can only speak with
authority from a Java perspective, so bear with me. Java has a huge
community of frameworks, tools, building environments, IDEs and
anything else you can imagine. On a daily basis, I rely on tools such
as:

* continuous integration engines such as Hudson or Cruise Control
provide an up-to-the-minute overview of the status of the code
repository
* build systems such as maven to provide out-of-the-box automated
building, testing, test coverage, code quality checks etc.
* IDEs with strong refactoring tools, debuggers and direct version
control integration
* etc.

> If you want a guaranteed living from Ruby, get good at Rails. (It gets
> boring, though.)

I'm not really into web development (more backend server
applications), so I think I will be looking at plain ruby first :-)

Best regards,

Ben