Ruby Reaches Big Leagues With Two IDEs
Komodo, Ruby in Steel updates drive spread of object-oriented scripting language
March 15, 2007 —
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The year has started off well for Ruby programmers developing on Windows. After a year of explosive growth in popularity, the object-oriented interpreted language with particular strengths in scripting and Web development finally has not one, but two professional development environments that give the language the primacy it deserves.
Not that the environments of either Komodo 4 (ActiveState, US$295) or Ruby in Steel (SapphireSteel Software, US$199) are Ruby-specific; Komodo is well known in Perl and PHP development circles, and Ruby in Steel is a plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 (Standard Edition and above—users of the free Express Editions are unfortunately excluded).
RUBY’S RISE
Ruby was first released to the public in 1995 by its designer Yukihiro Matsumoto and developed to a broadly usable language by the early 2000s. For a few years, it was a well-regarded but not particularly popular alternative to the so-called “dynamic” languages in the Perl/Python continuum. Compared with other dynamic scripting languages, Ruby is distinguished by completely embracing object orientation as an organizing principle. The influence of Perl and Smalltalk are clear in the design of the language, with Perl’s scripting-oriented love of implicit variables and optional parentheses and Smalltalk’s emphasis on manipulating objects with a straightforward grammar. Ruby’s grammar is complicated somewhat by the aforementioned optional elements, as well as inconsistencies on the equivalence of curly brackets and “do … end” tokens.
The 2004 release of David Heinemeier Hansson’s Ruby on Rails “opinionated” Web framework sparked the current Ruby fever. Rails’ philosophy of “convention over configuration”—in which likely good enough decisions about project structure, naming, build strategies and database mapping are automatically generated—was both provocative and productive.
Popular books from The Pragmatic Programmers further evangelized the language, tied it to the latest trends in agile development, and with their sales triggered the current avalanche of books, blogs, conferences and coverage. And, now, development environments.
Ruby is unusual in that the two areas in which it has the greatest demonstrable strength—small scripts and Rails-based Web development—have remarkably different development styles. Scripts, ranging from a few to a few hundred lines of code, are the stuff of a single file, hard-coded paths and variables, interaction and quick edits.
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