> To some extent we tend to use irb for that sort of thing. It's a very > interactive way to develop and you can always type: foo.methods.sort > when you want to figure out what methods an object repsonds to.
I totally agree with Phil. Using irb along with a powerful editor can provide some of the utility of modern IDEs, though certainly not all. A crucial element of this is customizing your .irbrc configuration file. Like Phil describes above with foo.methods.sort, my .irbrc contains the following snippet: class Object def mymethods (self.public_methods - self.class.superclass.public_instance_methods).sort end end This allows me to type foo.mymethods and get only the methods that are defined for foo, but not the methods defined in its superclass, which I find is often what I want (and sorted!). Also, Tim, re: tab completion in IDEs, if you end up using the editor plus irb mode a lot, like I think a lot of Rubyists end up doing, make sure to add this to your .irbrc to turn on tab completion in the REPL: require 'irb/completion' ARGV.concat [ "--readline", "--prompt-mode", "simple" ] Of course, it only works when it can figure out the type of things, which is difficult. But it's still might provide a tiny bit of what you miss from the IDE world. Type []. and hit tab to see the array methods tab complete. Anyways, the lack of a compelling IDE is weak point for Ruby, but I think a lot of us find some of the language decisions themselves lesson the need for an IDE and the productivity gains from the language itself often outweigh any resulting loss. Ah well, it's a good area for future work... =) Toph _______________________________________________ PDXRuby mailing list [email protected] IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
