This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: IDE's, Unicode, Racism, Java
Feed Title: Testing 1,2,3...
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First, Ruby has a few: RDT, Komodo, ArachnoRuby, etc. There's even a VS plugin, Ruby in Steel.
Second, it's funny how often I hear Java programmers, and no one else, whining about this. I've found that if I mention a new computer language to most programmers they'll immediately ask intelligent questions like, "Does it have closures? Does it support native threads?" and so on. I've also noticed that if I mention a new computer language to a Java programmer they'll immediately ask, "Does it have an IDE?".
What does that tell you? I leave it for you to decide.
"There should be a background parser running all the time so that you always know if you have syntax errors and can jump to them..."
Are you kidding me? Every editor more advanced than Notepad has syntax highlighting that let's you know if you've made a mistake. Odd complaint.
"I shouldn���t have to type the names of well-known methods..."
Ruby's classes tend to be too deep for this to be useful IMHO. Besides, just how lazy are you? You really have to be a NetBeans addict to complain about something like this I guess.
"The computer should help with refactoring; and all you really need is renaming..."
:1,$s/foo/bar/g <= I need an IDE for this?
"I should never have to scroll much..."
Most editors have code folding (though I've never liked vim's much). Komodo and VS do the best job in this regard, IMHO. Ok, so IDE's are good for something. ;)
"Unit testing should be part of the infrastructure"
It's easy enough to set this up with most editors via hotkeys.
DOCUMENTATION
"The fact that Ruby���s documentation is laughably incomplete..."
Where *exactly* did you find the documentation incomplete? Enquiring minds want to know.
UNICODE
"...certain aspects of Unicode are, on the surface at least, objectively racist; for example, why does UTF-8 encoding of characters become progressively less efficient as you move from the languages of the Western hemisphere to those of the East?"
Whoa, huh? Racism? You mean it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that CJKV uses glyphs instead of characters? Or that they have multiple writing systems. Or that there are multiple romanization schemes. Or any of a host of other issues, none of which have anything to do with racism. And never mind the fact that it seems to handle the languages of Africa, the Middle East and even Thailand just fine afaik.
<sarcasm>Yep. Racism. That's it.</sarcasm>
UTF8 becomes less efficient (for some definition of 'efficient') as you move to the languages of the Eastern hemisphere because they're a much harder problem to solve.
1. On IDEs: it's stupid and wrong to make humans do typing where computers in principle can fill in the data. Java takes three times as much code to do anything as Ruby and I can write it nearly as fast, because of the IDE. Obviously you've never really used a decent refactoring engine.
2. Ruby documentation is pathetic. Try "ri Net::Http", or go try to understand the Element.elements field by reading the REXML documentation. Fortunately, the source is so readable that this hurts les than you'd think.
3. UTF-8, not Unicode, is racist. UTF-16, for example, stores code points in 16 bits uniformly whether you're from Cleveland or Shanghai. Go to http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/26/UTF and search for "racist". You should read up a bit on character encoding issues, they're interesting.
I would suggest you focus your commentary on issues where you're actually well-informed, which clearly do not include IDEs, software documentation, or i18n.
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