Dave Hoover, one of my fellow colleagues at Obtiva, is collaborating with the people at 8th Light to bring us one of the first conferences focused on software craftsmanship (Software Craftsmanship North America):
http://scna.softwarecraftsmanship.com/
I originally got introduced to the idea of Software Craftsmanship while reading the Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas, and later learned more about it through the book titled Software Craftsmanship by Pete-McBreen.
I even blogged about Software Craftsmanship contrasting it with Software Engineering over here:
http://andymaleh.blogspot.com/2008/12/software-craftsmanship-vs-software.html
Well, if you want to learn more about it, InfoQ recently posted an interview with Dave Hoover clarifying the purpose and goals behind the conference:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/software-craftsmanship-conf
Feel free to post a comment if you have any questions about it
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
The IDE vs Editor War in the Ruby World
Ever since I switched to Ruby programming last September to develop Rails web applications, I've been fighting an up-hill battle to convince other developers of the value of using Eclipse or IDEs in general.
Since Ruby is an interpreted language (with a transparent compilation step for optimizations purposes only), developers mainly rely on test-driven development to produce reliable code. Auto-compilation and verification of code is thus rendered for the most part unnecessary.
Additionally, given Ruby's support for attributes (via attr* methods) and no need to declare class variables, many of the source code generators used in Java are not needed in Ruby. After all, Ruby's philosophy is about producting the tersest most abstract code, free of boiler-plate repetitive code.
Refactoring with Ruby is often done manually, but given that there isn't usually a lot of code with proper abstraction, and given Ruby's method aliasing support, huge refactorings of the nature that ripples through the whole system are rare, and thus refactoring is quite easy to perform manually especially given the protection of the Ruby must-have unit tests.
So, what does that leave as far as tooling needs? Color coding, syntax highlighting, file lookup, search and replace, and possibly some autocompletion capabilities.
Well, these limited needs brought back the popularity of simple editors that support just these features. By simple editors, I do actually mean good old VIM and emacs as well as the new extremely popular Mac editor, TextMate.
After 10 months of pair-programming with different Ruby developers with varying habits and backgrounds, I got to do a pilgrimage through most Ruby editors and IDEs. So far, I've gone through TextMate, VIM, Aptana RadRails, Eclipse DLTK, NetBeans, and IntelliJ RubyMine.
Yes, I'm a shortcut freak, and I used to write Java programs in Eclipse mouse-less!!! So, how did other editors and IDEs measure in comparison as far as shortcuts and productivity?
I'll leave that to another post.
In the meantime, what is your opinion of the matter? Do any of you prefer editors over IDEs? If so what's your editor/IDE of choice and what are the reasons you like it? Feel free to mention different ones for different programming languages.
Since Ruby is an interpreted language (with a transparent compilation step for optimizations purposes only), developers mainly rely on test-driven development to produce reliable code. Auto-compilation and verification of code is thus rendered for the most part unnecessary.
Additionally, given Ruby's support for attributes (via attr* methods) and no need to declare class variables, many of the source code generators used in Java are not needed in Ruby. After all, Ruby's philosophy is about producting the tersest most abstract code, free of boiler-plate repetitive code.
Refactoring with Ruby is often done manually, but given that there isn't usually a lot of code with proper abstraction, and given Ruby's method aliasing support, huge refactorings of the nature that ripples through the whole system are rare, and thus refactoring is quite easy to perform manually especially given the protection of the Ruby must-have unit tests.
So, what does that leave as far as tooling needs? Color coding, syntax highlighting, file lookup, search and replace, and possibly some autocompletion capabilities.
Well, these limited needs brought back the popularity of simple editors that support just these features. By simple editors, I do actually mean good old VIM and emacs as well as the new extremely popular Mac editor, TextMate.
After 10 months of pair-programming with different Ruby developers with varying habits and backgrounds, I got to do a pilgrimage through most Ruby editors and IDEs. So far, I've gone through TextMate, VIM, Aptana RadRails, Eclipse DLTK, NetBeans, and IntelliJ RubyMine.
Yes, I'm a shortcut freak, and I used to write Java programs in Eclipse mouse-less!!! So, how did other editors and IDEs measure in comparison as far as shortcuts and productivity?
I'll leave that to another post.
In the meantime, what is your opinion of the matter? Do any of you prefer editors over IDEs? If so what's your editor/IDE of choice and what are the reasons you like it? Feel free to mention different ones for different programming languages.
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