Ruby Screenshot of the Week #10: Taking Up The Gauntlet

SapphireSteel, makers of the Ruby In Steel plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio, has been touting their own code completion feature for a while. One thing which has irked me a bit is that they tend to dismiss "code completion" as inferior to "true IntelliSense" - as if code completion is the name for simple identifier matching. Just to be clear - IntelliSense is a trademark of Microsoft, so nobody else calls the same feature that. Borland has referred to it as CodeInsight, but most IDEs refer to this feature as code completion. In this article, SapphireSteel is throwing down the gauntlet by encouraging their users to see if anyone else can produce results like theirs: To the best of our knowledge, Ruby In Steel’s IntelliSense for Ruby is unrivalled by any other IDE. {...} We’ve also supplied a few files from our IntelliSense test suite which we invite you to use with Ruby In Steel and any other editor or IDE of your choice. So, I thought I would show what code completion in NetBeans is capable of. Let's start with test 1, which calls for code completion on an array literal in the source: As you can see, we show the type of methods right in the code completion dialog. It doesn't matter much for an Array, but if you had invoked code completion on the numbers themselves, you'd see that some methods are coming from Integer, and some are coming from its parent class Numeric - and sometimes it&...

Date: April, 20 2007
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/tor/entry/ruby_screenshot_of_the_week9

Others News