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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

One area where Ruby could help improve developer experience is by providing a better debugging experience. I feel incredibly spoiled with Chrome Dev Tools. Meanwhile the last time I tried debugging heavy metaprogramming Ruby code it was a pain to figure out what was happening.

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Meta programming is my largest complaint with Ruby. It creates huge surprises that are very difficult to inspect and debug.

We ban most meta programming in our own code. While the meta programming solutions are fun and clever they are often more code than a functional version and hard to maintain.

We do allow the occasional use of “send” but try to avoid it. Dynamic method definitions are strictly banned.

what is ruby debug not able to do that you want it to do?

https://github.com/ruby/debug

a nice ide integrated experience:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/ruby#_debugging...

https://github.com/ruby/vscode-rdbg

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/debugging

heavy metaprogramming in any language is going to be a pain to debug so i'm not sure what you're expecting but there are tools to help. you can also call source_location on some method to figure out where things exist.

Ruby 3.3 has made major improvements to the debugging experience: https://railsatscale.com/2023-12-19-irb-for-ruby-3-3/

that's surprising considering `pry`[1] is such an amazing debugger IMO.

[1] https://github.com/pry/pry

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