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by Rick DeNatale.
Original Post: True Confesssions
Feed Title: Talk Like A Duck
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Feed Description: Musings on Ruby, Rails, and other topics by an experienced object technologist.
Pat took that belief to task, and I've got to agree.
Like all of you, my gentle readers, I'm perfect. I never make mistakes, so I never need a debugger. Well I thought that I made a mistake once, but discovered I was wrong!
Seriously, when I first encountered Ruby it was really lacking in debugger support. Although I missed a good debugger, I struggled along, and yes, I didn't miss it all that much. Why? Because a debugger has always been just one tool in my arsenal.
Most of the time I'm happy to write tests, see that the test fails, write code, make the test pass, lather, rinse and repeat. By taking small steps, I find that it usually goes rather well.
But, on the rare occasion, that fourth step poses problems, and that's when I pull out rdebug.
In fact it's usually: rdebug test/unit/someclass_test.rb although I run rails under rdebug from time to time.
Ruby IDEs like netbeans and aptana are now provide good integrated debugging. Pat mentions this, although he's not as hooked in to the ruby community as he should be, so I don't think he realizes that they are using rdebug through an ide interface wrapper.
Now using IDEs seems to be another moral failing by some luminaries estimation, but then again maybe not.
Personally, I've got nothing against a good IDE, Heck, I used to work with and on Smalltalk IDEs (VisualAge), and Java IDEs (VA/JAVA, VA MicroEdition, and Eclipse). But I've been almost as happy using VIM on Linux and now TextMate on OSX. There's even a TextMate bundle which talks to rdebug and let's you set breakpoints.
I don't use that much, but when I need it, I'm happy and unashamed.
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