40. (with egg)

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Normally I don't spam/link post, but this is too important not to shout out to the world: Ruby development, with debugging support, and soon with Rails support, in... wait for it... wait for it...Visual Studio 2005! Check out Steel here:

If you talk to any of my coworkers, they will tell you that I am an Eclipse zealot. I love Eclipse. I love and understand it's way of thinking, and I am the most productive with this IDE. Well, at least I used to be when I was doing full time Java development with Eclipse's Java IDE, which is actually a massive Eclipse plugin. Now I'm a full time Ruby on Rails developer using the painfully poor Ruby/Rails plugins for Eclipse: RDT and RadRails. RDT and RadRails are developed by Some Dudes who are busy either working at real jobs that don't include developing free IDEs for me, or studying for finals and being excited that they are old enough to drink beer. Point being that the IDE support for Ruby and/or Rails is stone age at this point, and 99% of the features I use for Ruby development are not RDT/RadRails features at all, but default Eclipse feature or features from other plugins, such as the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS support from the excellent J2EE Standard Tools project.

If Steel can bring to Ruby/Ruby on Rails development even a small portion of productivity gaining features that I sorely miss from Eclipse's Java IDE, then I will burn my Eclipse Fan Club membership card and send the ashes to Erich Gamma, then buy Visual Studio for my workplace with my own money.

Can you tell I'm excited about this? I'm switching back and forth between writing this post and reading the Sapphire In Steel home page. I've just read the About Us page and I'm getting more insight into why these guys "get it". Here are some snippits:

has spent the last twenty years...

has programmed in languages ranging from Delphi and Java to C# and Smalltalk...

since 1988...

Ah, there it is -- These are Old Dudes! I love Old Dudes! And I really love Old Dudes Who Know Smalltalk! I was nurtured, sculpted, and brainwashed by Old Dudes Who Know Smalltalk from my very first day as a professional programmer, and they universally "get it". Young whipper-snappers out there, take note: if you ever here some Old Dude say the words "in Smalltalk you could blah blah blah" or "In VisualWorks you could yada yada", spend as much time with this person as possible. You will learn more from them about software development than the Young Dude who only wears black and thinks that the bash shell is "too bloated".

And what does "get it" mean? Maybe I'll get into that some other time (it will be ugly, as this is one are where I am very opinionated), but the important thing is this: these guys don't come from the school of web scripting hackery in vi, they come from the land of building real enterprise applications, where real tool support is appreciated. And at this point in the Ruby IDE game, I'd place my bets on them to produce the first a truly usefully development tool.

1 Comments (from old blog):

At 9/30/2006 8:18 AM, Torv said…

Well, finally you get it ;)

www.squeak.org