Yes, tools matter

Sometimes people comment to me that I will change my mind rather quickly. I admit that this is sometimes true: life is a little like a game of chess, and you 'play the current position'.

Anyway, I have been perhaps too smug with Ruby and Netbeans 6.0: really a fairly good development environment for a very good language. Anyway, I have really been enjoying using Ruby+Netbeans - so much better than using TextMate or Emacs.

That said, Patrick Logan's blog on Dynamic Languages: Should the Tools Suck? made me do a double take. The first thing that I did was to fire up Squeak Smalltalk and run Patrick's message sender example. I am grateful to the developers of Netbeans and especially the Ruby support plugins, but yes, Ruby IDE support is still weak compared to Smalltalk - but hopefully getting better faster. (BTW, Squeak is almost as slow as Ruby, execution wise. Commercial VisualWorks Smalltalk is a lot faster if you need the extra speed.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads