Hacker News Reader

Comment by levirosol | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Twitter, Scribd, Hulu, Friends for Sale would agree.

I agree that .Net projects do tend to differ from Ruby projects. But I'm not willing to be as definitive as the author by saying "Ruby and .Net Developers Solve Two Different Kinds of Problems". That's too black and white for me.

Also, the fact that there are IDE's for Ruby (RubyMine and Netbeans) shows that there is becoming more of a desire / need for an IDE in the Ruby world. Even the good old standard of using TextMate mixed with a zillion plugins / macros shows a need.

Getting back to the point of the tweep's original question though; If a person doesn't understand the value of intellesense, they're not doing it right.

View on HN

If a person doesn't understand the value of intellesense, they're not doing it right

I think the argument against a full-blown IDE which optimizes code-writing is, if it's possible for an IDE to make your code easier to read or write, why isn't it possible to simply improve the programming language itself to make the code easier to read or write? Some sort of automated code translation/compression/generation is improving the coding experience for you, the developer. So why can't that improvement be baked into your compiler/parser/libraries, so the program's code reflects that improvement regardless of the tool you use to view it?

Regardless of how simple a ruby API is, I can't keep them all in my head. That's why there are tools like ri and the various ruby doc sites. Having that integrated could be useful. When I do a lot of coding, I usually have a lot of browser and textmate windows open for reference.

This is what I'm referring to. An IDE should make what I already know easier to get from brain to fingers to keyboard to screen.

Intellesense does this by letting me type a couple chars of a known method, then pressing tab.

It should also make what I kinda know easier to find.

A good IDE does this by letting me find a method in intellesense and showing me the method description.

I think you misunderstand what intellisense does. For example, if I start typing a method name then it will give me the possible completions from which to choose and if I call a method it will remind me of the parameters required. These are not things that can be "baked into the compiler/parser/libraries".

If your thesis were correct, (which I don't think it is) then you could just as easily argue that Ruby is verbose because Rails auto-generates code.

I was once at a lunch with one of the Franz Allegro lisp dudes and he said that he'd had an epiphany about the nature of Java and IDEs. He said Java does have macros in a sense, it's just that they're one way and built into the IDE.

I don't buy this argument that "enterprise" software requires enterprise languages and tools either. There are plenty of counterexamples of large, complex systems built in dynamic languages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com