05 October, 2006

Yegge On Ruby

I first have to admit that I tend to find Steve Yegge's writings boorish at best. His post on Agile processes illustrates some of his worst. However, he has an entertaining writing style that keeps me coming back.

This brings me to an old post of his on resistance to Ruby. Specifically, the lack of automated refactoring tools in Ruby. When did refactoring become about pushing buttons in an IDE? It certainly never started there. Is it not interesting that the author of Refactoring, Martin Fowler, uses Ruby?

That said, I'm feeling a bit guilty of the whole push-button programming sickness myself. (Maybe Eclipse is a little too cool). I think it's time for me to pick up Refactoring again and give it a good re-read.

In the meantime, I think <gasp!> Steve is right: Ruby is a butterfly.

edit:    this article is a good companion to Yegge's article.

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