Chatting over a beer with Ola Bini last year, we discussed the possibilities for JRuby. My dream was to run a Ruby IDE on top of JRuby to get a Smalltalk like environment, because Smalltalk is still the best programming environment I have ever used.
Now that 3rdRail, running on JRuby, is released, should I get my hopes up? Some people are actually very excited about it, but when Delphi and JBuilder are referred to as some sort of pinnacle of development it seriously makes me wonder.
Tags: Java, rails, rails tools jruby, Ruby, smalltalk, stockholm
I see your point of view, and if you took some more time to examine my blog, you would see my interview with Avi Bryant. I am no stranger to Smalltalk and I have pointed out clearly that there are many things about Smalltalk that we will be learning from for a long time.
It happens in the evolution of any language that the tools get better, and that is what I am excited about. We are a long way from Smalltalk, but intelligent IDE’s are a giant step along the way.
Thanks for reading.
Mike, I actually had read your interview, but I did not make the connection when I read your post as I had missed the attribution at the top of the interview.
As for how much IDE’s really are worth, I am not so sure anymore. There are too many people using Java etc. that motivates their continued use of it because of the tool support: “I want code completion, refactoring etc.”. I used to be like that too.
But now I realize that the power Ruby gives me as a language far outweighs all advantages Java et al has in form of tool support, and the comfort given by the IDE obscured that fact for me.