John Carter writes:

# On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Conrad Schneiker wrote:
# 
# > John Carter writes:
# > 
# > # Is there someone somewhere developing a Ruby refactoring browser?
# > 
# > Then there was the issue of whether Tk was a tolerable GUI choice for 
# > something that would hopefully grow into a full-fledged 
industrial-strengh 
# > IDE.
# 
# Hmm. The joys of wxWindows aside, I have a couple of hard earned rules
# of programming life...
#  * Never write a sort routine, you'll never get it as smart as the gnu
#    qsort.
#  * Never check for an error condition you don't know how to handle.
#  * Never write an editor. (A lot of the glueyist of gui's would 
magically
#    vanish if people held to that one...)
# 
# I would tack it onto Emacs. Let Emacs be the IDE, its _very_ good at 
that. 
# And let the RRB (Ruby Refactoring Browser) handle the parsing, 
treewalking
# scanning, structure display, transforming, rewriting etc. etc. There is 
an
# interesting thread going that mentioned a perl/elisp tie up. 
# 
# Of course, displaying the inheritance tree etc. etc. you can do in
# wxWindows, and when you go "click-edit that" it merely tells emacs to 
open
# that file at that position!

Well, that certainly makes a lot of sense, so long as it's not an 
Emacs-*only*  (versus, say, an Enacs-first) solution. 

I have nothing against Emacs; I only stopped using it years ago because it 
was very inconvenient in the sorts of varied/changing environments that I 
frequently worked in. Moreover, it's my (highly subjective) impression 
(from sources ranging from comp.editors to the list of editors that Perl 
folks recommended to each other 
(http://www.perl.com/reference/query.cgi?section=editors&x=17&y=12)) that 
an Emacs-only solution would exclude (very loosely speaking) something on 
the order 90% of the potential users of a Ruby refactoring browser. 

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)