Why Ruby does not nead an ide

[David Vallner]

Yeah, 'cause things never add up.

160 GB of hard drive space cost as much as a month of a 1 pack / day
smoking habit. You could almost fit a whole Debian archive into that.
E.g. probably more software than most computer users will ever need to
use, in several versions, for 10 different computer architectures.

Computer storage space is so dirt cheap and available in mass quantities
it's simply not possible to fill a large amount of it with only software
that doesn't have humongous requirements on data needed at runtime.
Sometimes things just don't add up. I'd be interested on how a non-edge
case workstation setup where they do would contain.

Hey, I just find all this OS vs. editor holy war stuff funny. If you
want to be offended, though, I can't stop you.

[insert rusty fork / eye poking comment here]

David Vallner

 

[David Vallner]

So, having done the empirical measurement of starting the bittorrent
download of the Win32 version (I'm sticking to my gaming partition while
on vacation), I got download speeds of 300-400 kB/s over a 4 Mbit
connection. The Linux x86-64 swarm needs some loving, but local Ubuntu
repositories still reach around 220 kB/s download speeds without a
problem. 10-20 minutes download time, not stellar, but fits into a lunch
break.

I've pulled single MP3 files that size through the connection. That's
roughly two hours at 192 kbps - a not uncommon size for a DJ gig ripped
off webradio. And those sure as hell crop up more often than new Eclipse
versions.

It falls into the tolerance limit for me. YMMV. What's important -for
me- is that Eclipse does deliver in features (and then some), and does
so without getting in the way for most of my usage scenarios - the only
necessary evil in the way to editing code I feel is setting up a new
project to tell Eclipse where in the filesystem to look when using Open
Resource. I honestly could care less about download size if it's
downloadable in reasonable down-time, and about performance if it runs
fast enough on hardware I work on.

I can also very well understand the decision to make RDT and RADRails
Eclipse plugins. Java development bloatware or not, it probably has an
amazing amount of resources for tool development included, and you don't
have to reinvent the wheel with project management, version control
integration, code template support, and the list could go on and on. You
can concentrate on just making it support Ruby, and I could invoke the
DRY principle here, which probably holds more value than
not-quite-tangible lightweight / heavyweight "language attitude"
arguments when deciding how to implement a fairly complex tool. (SWT
also looks better than FOX if you're being aesthetic.)

A fourth of the download size was Seamonkey. Which sounds a lot like a
packaging problem, or something on the Mozilla side of things. I can't
believe you need all that to be able to embed Gecko into SWT.

PS: If trying out, go for Eclipse 3.1. 3.0 was rather slow, and 3.2 is
still early adoption and needs to have some kinks worked out.

David Vallner

 

[David Vallner]

Windows ME?

I know people who still use and adore that OS.

But how can we forget the archetypal failure in software development, MS
Bob?

David Vallner

 

[David Vallner]

GOTOful programming?

College freshman assembly? Hey, you could squeeze tens of CPU clock
cycles of performance using GOTOs instead of procedures when possible...

David Vallner

 

[David Vallner]

MSDOS

Hey, no touching *very* successful home gaming platforms - IIRC, the DOS
scene shined on for quite a while after Amigas fell into pitiful
stagnation. The low resource requirements and the "flexibility" that
direct everything access provided are probably to blame in a large part
for home computing as we know it today. Maybe the system didn't go the
Right Way, but it sure as hell went the Way that Worked.

*cuddles his DOSBox protectively*

David Vallner

 

[Chad Perrin]

160 GB of hard drive space cost as much as a month of a 1 pack / day
smoking habit. You could almost fit a whole Debian archive into that.
E.g. probably more software than most computer users will ever need to
use, in several versions, for 10 different computer architectures.

Computer storage space is so dirt cheap and available in mass quantities
it's simply not possible to fill a large amount of it with only software
that doesn't have humongous requirements on data needed at runtime.
Sometimes things just don't add up. I'd be interested on how a non-edge
case workstation setup where they do would contain.

I don't own any 160GB hard drives. I have no use for them. My largest
hard drive is exactly half that, and I have storage space to spare. I
like that situation.

I prefer to keep using what I've got until I need to upgrade to suit
some specific need, rather than running around looking for needs to
justify buying more hardware.

 

[Chad Perrin]

Hey, no touching *very* successful home gaming platforms - IIRC, the DOS
scene shined on for quite a while after Amigas fell into pitiful
stagnation. The low resource requirements and the "flexibility" that
direct everything access provided are probably to blame in a large part
for home computing as we know it today. Maybe the system didn't go the
Right Way, but it sure as hell went the Way that Worked.

This is true, but . . . I let the MSDOS comment slide because of other,
better versions of DOS.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

[snip]

I only used the download size as an indicator of package size. I usually
get close to my Comcast 8 mbit download speeds from the Gentoo mirror
down the road about sixty miles at Oregon State University.

I can also very well understand the decision to make RDT and RADRails
Eclipse plugins. Java development bloatware or not, it probably has an
amazing amount of resources for tool development included, and you don't
have to reinvent the wheel with project management, version control
integration, code template support, and the list could go on and on. You
can concentrate on just making it support Ruby, and I could invoke the
DRY principle here, which probably holds more value than
not-quite-tangible lightweight / heavyweight "language attitude"
arguments when deciding how to implement a fairly complex tool. (SWT
also looks better than FOX if you're being aesthetic.)

I think more to the point is that Eclipse has a lot of Java web
developer muscle memory behind it. Suppose you took someone used to
Eclipse and said, "OK -- here's Rails. You don't need any of that junk.
Just open up a couple of konsole or xterm or cmd windows and a browser,
edit a couple of config files and Ruby scripts in vi or emacs or
notepad, and you're on the air!"

"Oh yeah? We don't use ant, we use rake. We don't use junit ..." I'm
used to lightweight tools ... a lot of people aren't.

PS: If trying out, go for Eclipse 3.1. 3.0 was rather slow, and 3.2 is
still early adoption and needs to have some kinks worked out.

I don't know if 3.1 is available in Gentoo, and even if it is, since
this is a hobby project, I think if I use Eclipse at all it will be for
the learning experience, and I'll go with 3.2. What I need is something
that understands C/C++, Python and Ruby more or less equally well. What
I *don't* need for this project is anything related to Java! And Eclipse
seems very much of the Java people, by the Java people and for the Java
people.

I did download and install KDevelop 3.3.4. It seems to have some Rails
support built in, though all I did was create a project just to watch
what happened. The only gotcha with KDevelop is that it's probably Linux
only. I suspect it could be made to work (with a sizable performance
hit) under CygWin, since I've seen KDE made to work that way (with a
sizable performance hit). Right now KDevelop looks like my best bet,
although I haven't looked at what the Gnome side of the house has to
offer yet.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

It's not really a fair comparison. If you built an Emacs with all the
capabilities of an Eclipse, it would make use of a large number of
platform-specific libraries that are already present for many other
purposes. Almost all the libraries listed in your emerge output are Java
libraries unrelated to Eclipse that provide similar features to those
native
libraries.

Uh yeah ... Eclipse is a Java IDE. As I noted elsewhere, "xemacs-sumo"
is also huge. And also as I noted elsewhere, I don't use Emacs or XEmacs.

The down side of using Java in this case is that many wheels had
to be reinvented...note jzlib, for example. The up side is that those
libraries almost always "just work" without modification or even
recompilation on other platforms.

Uh yeah ... Eclipse is a Java IDE.

The other half of this is some Gentoo
stupidness...since Gentoo builds everything from scratch, it pulls in a
vast
number of projects to build Eclipse that are in many cases not even
necessary for running Eclipse, since the tools to build Eclipse are also
written in Java and have many of their own dependencies...etc etc. I
*rarely* use Gentoo to completely rebuild Java apps, since it's usually
totally unnecessary; prebuilt binaries will be exactly as fast and run
without modification.

I think Gentoo does have a pre-built Eclipse, though I think it's only 3.2.

It might be more fair to compare a prebuilt Eclipse, since Emacs benefits
from most of the libraries and tools it needs already existing on most *NIX
environments. On my system, where Java is prevalent, installing Eclipse
involves only a couple packages. Or perhaps compare Eclipse to building
Emacs and all its native library dependencies, including for example libc.

Well, since you're a Java developer, what is your reaction to

"OK -- here's Rails. You don't need any of that junk.
Just open up a couple of konsole or xterm or cmd windows and a browser,
edit a couple of config files and Ruby scripts in vi or emacs or
notepad, and you're on the air!"

"Oh yeah ... We don't use ant, we use rake. We don't use junit ..."

 

[Bill Kelly]

Hey, no touching *very* successful home gaming platforms - IIRC, the DOS
scene shined on for quite a while after Amigas fell into pitiful
stagnation. The low resource requirements and the "flexibility" that
direct everything access provided are probably to blame in a large part
for home computing as we know it today. Maybe the system didn't go the
Right Way, but it sure as hell went the Way that Worked.

Apologies in advance for contributing to the [OT]ness...

Background: I've used MSDOS since PC-DOS V1.0, and also
got heavily into Amiga starting at V1.0...

I don't think it was lack of direct access everything that
killed the Amiga. The OS was an impressive marvel of simple
layers with respect to hardware access. If you wanted to go
lower-level, you could, legally, just peel back a layer and
use lower-level access, in harmony with the rest of the OS.
Windows -> Screens -> ViewPorts -> Views -> Supplying your
own gfx-coprocessor display lists -> To actually requesting
(borrowing) a chunk of hardware registers from the OS and
giving them back (disk, blitter, copper, color, sound...)
-> or, just taking over the whole system as many games did.

Direct access wasn't hard on the Amiga; indeed the OS was
layered so you could usually get whatever level access you
needed (down to banging the hardware registers directly)
without taking over the system. (But you could still take
over the system easily if you wanted.)

Personally what killed the Amiga in my view was bitplanes.



Or, more generally, that the OS was structured around a
very specific gfx and sound hardware architechure that
was a work of genius and a superlative feat of
flexibility and economy in 1985, but which didn't scale
well.

On PCs, by comparison, any gfx or sound hardware (beyond
the internal speaker beep) came on a plug-in card, from
day one. MGA, CGA, VGA... Soundblaster... One could
upgrade video and sound by plugging in a card.

I was still writing Amiga games when DooM came out for
the PC. One could buy an 8-bit graphics card for the
PC and play DooM. There was just no practical equivalent
on the Amiga... The thought of trying to implement a
game like DooM in 8 or even 6 bitplanes... A nightmare.
Some folks made some demos, as I recall, and they ran
predictably slow.

There were certainly other factors in the Amiga's
demise... but I think the entrenchment of its aging
hardware architecture, and the difficulty for any third
party to develop a plug-in gfx or sound card that was
compatible with the OS, was a huge nail in the poor
platform's coffin...


Haha... OK... /me reaches for Kleenex...


Regards,

boing!

 

[Chad Perrin]

You missed my point entirely. And it's great you're able to use vi or ed or
whatever other minimalist environment to do whatever you do. If I choose to
use a nailgun to build a house and you choose to use a hammer, both
approaches are valid.

Screw that. Real programmers use echo, cat, and redirects.

 

[Rörd Hinrichsen]

Am Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:48:36 +0900 schrieb Hal Fulton:

I couldn't think of any paradigm that came before
"structured programming." GOTOful programming?
Unstructured programming?

Could "spaghetti code" be called a paradigm?


Rörd

 

[David Vallner]

I think more to the point is that Eclipse has a lot of Java web
developer muscle memory behind it. Suppose you took someone used to
Eclipse and said, "OK -- here's Rails. You don't need any of that junk.
Just open up a couple of konsole or xterm or cmd windows and a browser,
edit a couple of config files and Ruby scripts in vi or emacs or
notepad, and you're on the air!"

I'd scream very loudly and castrate anyone that would try and take
project management, working sets, and the consistent CVS / SVN handling
of the source control tools with a wooden spoon. I tried text-editor
only Rails. (Didn't know about RadRails yet.) Broke within two days and
did an 'aptitude install kdevelop' ;P

Seeing as J2EE actually pays my bills, that muscle memory isn't going
anywhere fast.

And Eclipse
seems very much of the Java people, by the Java people and for the Java
people.

To avoid misleading, I'll admit that it is. At least plugin wise, JDT
does get by far the most attention from the core team past the
integration work to make CDT behave nicely with Callisto. Although
managed make CDT projects work surprisingly well to build wxWidgets
based programs, and CDT plays along with the Cygwin GCC and everything
around it quite nicely. Since only Java and now also C/C++ and various
J2EE web development related languages are supported first-class, Ruby /
Python / Perl support is only as good as the communities around the
respective plugins make them. Here (if not sooner) my knowledge ends, it
would probably take someone from the RDT / RadRails team to judge just
how much the facilities of the language-neutral Eclipse Platform they
made use of / have yet to fully exploit. Rakefile integration could be
nice along the lines of the Ant integration (run as rake task launches).
Integrating the database development tools of Eclipse 3.2 even nicer -
exporting / importing / automatical synchronisation between the Rails
database config file and the tool configuration.

Right now KDevelop looks like my best bet,
although I haven't looked at what the Gnome side of the house has to
offer yet.

From a brief look at it, precious little. The Gnome equivalent to
KDevelop seems to be Anjuta. Anjuta's support for programming languages
besided C and C++ isn't - one of the reasons making it very hard to
decide which of the desktop environments to use. (I abhor any
applications that don't integrate with the desktop.)

David Vallner

 

[David Vallner]

Apologies in advance for contributing to the [OT]ness...

Meh. The thread started with a rant, it was destined to sidetrack
horribly. Into about three flamewars at once too - an impressive feat, that.

Background: I've used MSDOS since PC-DOS V1.0, and also
got heavily into Amiga starting at V1.0...

I don't think it was lack of direct access everything that
killed the Amiga.

I didn't actually say that. Both systems were very successful gaming
platforms, and IIRC, Amiga hardware tended to be technologically
superior for most of the time they coexisted. Except it was also more
expensive - I don't think Amigas properly penetrated the European market
because of that, just like the Macintosh never did.

Especially in the later years, between 1992 - 1995, a lot of games were
made for both platforms, and Windows 3.1 was quite popular for secretary
work, which made the cheaper alternative easier to sell.

Surprising is however the speed with which Windows 95 took over the game
platform scene - a scan through Home of the Underdogs shows that it won
over by 1998, which seems a lot faster than the adoption of 2000 and XP
over 98 was.

Speaking of them Kleenex, hand me a few. I just remembered the amazing
cool credits you got for being the only kid in class / school that could
edit AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to make Cool Game Of The Month work
before DOS4GW came along. (Cor. I could hand-tune DOS memory usage in
grad school. How many nerd points do you get for that again?)

David Vallner

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Am Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:48:36 +0900 schrieb Hal Fulton:
=20
=20
Could "spaghetti code" be called a paradigm?
=20
=20
R=F6rd
=20
=20
=20

Yes, indeed it could. And to add to my challenge, I asked for something
that everyone on this list would agree sucked. I personally am not
willing to agree to that.

 

[Timothy Hunter]

Yes, indeed it could. And to add to my challenge, I asked for something
that everyone on this list would agree sucked. I personally am not
willing to agree to that.

SCO
RIAA

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

SCO
RIAA

SCO is certainly a strong contender, but I'll have to veto RIAA.

Hmmm ... how about acronyms? "Acronyms Suck?"

 

[Chad Perrin]

SCO is certainly a strong contender, but I'll have to veto RIAA.

Really? You think the RIAA doesn't suck?

Are you fond of people who ensure that there's no longer any guitar
tablature on the Internet, who contribute to the absurdly increasing
costs of CDs, who are attempting to eliminate any meaningful legal
definition of "fair use", and who are trying to get BitTorrent servers
shut down, often via methods that violate the laws of the countries in
which those methods are pursued?

I guess SOMEone has to support that crap, else the RIAA wouldn't still
exist.

 

[Murdoc]

<troll>
Speaking of which, is there any way to block anything he sends and quotes in replies? I swear I feel my ability to write proper English leak out my ears from that.
</troll>

David Vallner

What's with the troll tags?

--

 

[Matt Todd]

Please be kind.

Agree, silent is an alternative though

;D

M.T.