[MacRuby-devel] Show MacRuby? - a start...

Jordan K. Hubbard jkh at apple.com
Fri Feb 10 12:53:10 PST 2012


On Feb 10, 2012, at 10:52 AM, Robert Cloud <rcloud at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for this, I will definitely find it helpful.  I must confess that I have a tormented relationship with MacRuby.  I am a Pythonista and have found it extremely hard to move to the Ruby world.  My major issue with the language is the irb shell.  I definitely do not want to start a flame war, but I find it vastly inferior to iPython, especially iPython's newer releases.  Second, it frequently crashes when I do anything wrong syntactically.  I do appreciate MacRuby being a better accessor to Cocoa but in general don't think it is quite ready.  Instead I prototype my code in PyObjC and then implement it in Obj-C.  

I doubt that even the most ardent MacRuby admirer would claim that IRB (or MacRuby's "REPL", to old folks like me) is a totally awesome interactive development environment.  I've seen a few prototypes at something better / Cocoaish / IDEish in the past as well, but it's hard to design even a meaningful prototype when you're still struggling with the notion of your target audience and its needs.

It would be quite instructive, in other words, to have you enumerate at least some of the ways in which iPython kicks IRB to the curb.   Not in the spirit of having a really entertaining flame war but in the spirit of pointing out some demonstrable, tangible areas in which IRB might improve.  Who knows, someone on this list might be looking for just such a little project and struggling with the first great problem in computer science, namely trying to come up with an idea for something interesting to write (the other two being cache invalidation and naming things), and your bullet list could be just what they are waiting for!

- Jordan

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