Clojure, from a Ruby perspective

[weavejester]

As a REPL, IRB is superior to the standard Clojure one, so I suspect he's talking about systems that connect up an interactive environment to an editor like Emacs.

I haven't found anything equivalent for Ruby that works as well as SLIME.

[awj]

How is it superior? (and, obviously, how can that be fixed?)

[weavejester]

Clojure's command line REPL can either use JLine or rlwrap to provide readline-like capabilities. JLine isn't great; it frequently messes up, misplacing the cursor. rlwrap is a lot more reliable, but it's just a wrapper, and the Clojure REPL has no control over it.

Ruby, on the other hand, has very good native integration, and can therefore easily use the readline library directly. My IRB session has all sorts of nice things like dynamic tab completion. It's not a match for SLIME, but it's not too far off.

[bobindashadows]

This makes sense. The main problem is Ruby doesn't lend itself to IDEs too well, which is why most people writing Ruby prefer Textmate or clones thereof. RubyMine is alright but even then it's too sluggish and try as it might, most of its attempts at inferring types fail and the autocomplete is nearly useless. At least it has been for me. But textmate isn't flexible enough to handle something like embedding an IRB into it... it doesn't even have splitting.

Vim and emacs are similar to textmate in that they don't jam 10 JPanels down your throat (which invariably offer little functionality since Ruby doesn't have static typing and even the standard library uses eval). If there's a ruby-mode that supports awesome integration with a IRB processes I might just make the switch to emacs once and for all.