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“Did you mean?” Experience in Ruby

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Re: “Did you mean?” Experience in Ruby

#121

Post by barrkel »

prairiedogg wrote: post #28

I've been pairing with ruby / rails developers since 2010 and coming from statically typed languages, it's unbelievable how much time gets spent playing "guess the method name". Even in rich IDEs like RubyMine, the utter lack of context in any given file in rails leaves programmers typing their best guess of a method name, running the tests, rinse, repeat. This solution, while creative and laudable, solves a problem…

I stick a 'binding.pry' (pry gem) in the body of the method I'm trying to write, and I trigger it with a test that has all the correct parameters (i.e. the happy path).

I then write my code in the REPL. I can use 'ls' to look up available methods dynamically. Complex ActiveRecord queries are much easier to prototype. Finding the right method isn't usually too difficult. And pry supports prefix completion at the first level. Assign the result to a variable, and you can do more completion at the next level.

For loops and if-branches, I typically take the bit of data that is relevant to the loop body or that if branch, and work with it separately, to develop that branch. But it's more usual for me to use map and select than explicit loops in any case.

I copy each finished line of code from the repl into my editor, as and when I'm happy with it.

This method of working is also why I don't see any benefit from using RubyMine. I use emacs, and primarily I rely on global project regex (using helm-git-grep and helm-projectile) to navigate the system.

(A happy coincidence is that the default readline key bindings are emacs style, so a lot of what you learn in emacs maps straight over to the repl terminal.)

Re: “Did you mean?” Experience in Ruby

#122

Post by mikecmpbll »

Not sure how helpful this is, when it says there's no method called xyz, it's pretty obvious you called the wrong method, or you called it on the wrong thing. Your first thing should be checking that you didn't call the wrong method name.. which involves looking at the error which repeats the method name that you tried to call, and the object you called it on.

Bizarre that this is a genuine hang-up for people.

Re: “Did you mean?” Experience in Ruby

#123

Post by Solarsail »

brvs wrote: post #8

I would love it if instead of quitting my program with an error, it just went ahead and called the method it thinks I'm referring to. This would remove a lot of unneeded friction from web development.

One of the early PL/1 compilers IBM wrote in the 60's did something akin to this. It was a 'premium' feature, available in one of the more expensive compilers. Where it detected any error or wrong looking code, it would correct it. There's a story floating around somewhere on the net of one guy trying to use it... (Which I can't find at the moment.)

The first time he tried to compile with it, he used a program of roughly "Hello from PL/1". When he ran it, he got a division by zero error, because his string had been turned into an arithmetic expression. With the 1 turned into an I, which was then an unitialized variable, which then defaulted to 0.

Re: “Did you mean?” Experience in Ruby

#124

Post by klibertp »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #110
klibertp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need (static) type hinting, you can do the same with running a dynamic environment and querying it. That's how it's done in Smalltalk (see Pharo), some Lisps and so on.

You could guess, but it wouldn't work in cases where, for example methods are added to a class dynamically and non deterministically as a side effect of some other operation.

Do you know how "image based" environments work? In short you live in the same space as your code, so when you write some new method you have access to all the "dynamically and non deterministically" code artifacts. With Smalltalk the code is always being run and you get many useful tools for querying the state of a running system. I know it's hard to believe, but you can get much better completion (not to mention refactoring support) with this approach than you get from static analysis.

Re: “Did you mean?” Experience in Ruby

#126

Post by jaegerpicker »

jMyles wrote: post #35
rectangletangle wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context sensitive auto-complete is a godsend.

Seriously. Is there a good list of tools that provide it? In Python, the only one I've managed to love is PyDev. Supposedly Atom does it with the "script" package?

I use Intellij with the PyDev plugin as my IDE and Atom (with the script package) as my text editor. In general unless it's a really quick edit PyDev is MUCH better in the general IDE functions, like autocomplete, jump to definitions, visual breakpoint debugging, etc.. I love atom but Intellij is much better for serious dev/debugging sessions.

Re: “Did you mean?” Experience in Ruby

#127

Post by alexch »

stretchwithme wrote: post #25

I use Rubymine, which visually indicates when a variable is unused or doesn't exist. It has tons of other features that save you time and hassle.

RubyMine FTW. It's amazing to me how completely Dwarf Fortress -- um, I mean vim and tmux -- have conquered the Ruby dev world.

Re: “Did you mean?” Experience in Ruby

#128

Post by alexch »

prairiedogg wrote: post #28

I've been pairing with ruby / rails developers since 2010 and coming from statically typed languages, it's unbelievable how much time gets spent playing "guess the method name". Even in rich IDEs like RubyMine, the utter lack of context in any given file in rails leaves programmers typing their best guess of a method name, running the tests, rinse, repeat. This solution, while creative and laudable, solves a problem…

RubyMine is pretty damn good, especially because you can immediately jump to the source code, even of libraries, and just read the list of available methods. It's amazing to me how completely Dwarf Fortress -- um, I mean vim and tmux -- has conquered the Ruby dev world.

Re: “Did you mean?” Experience in Ruby

#129

Post by hawleyal »

prairiedogg wrote: post #28

I've been pairing with ruby / rails developers since 2010 and coming from statically typed languages, it's unbelievable how much time gets spent playing "guess the method name". Even in rich IDEs like RubyMine, the utter lack of context in any given file in rails leaves programmers typing their best guess of a method name, running the tests, rinse, repeat. This solution, while creative and laudable, solves a problem…

The tool (Ruby) does the hard work: foo.methods. Writing some code, running the tests, rinse, repeat. That describes the REPL way of doing things. Also, the way I prefer to code. Do something, examine the results, do something else.

Re: “Did you mean?” Experience in Ruby

#130

Post by jaegerpicker »

zerr wrote: post #71
prairiedogg wrote: post #28

I've been pairing with ruby / rails developers since 2010 and coming from statically typed languages, it's unbelievable how much time gets spent playing "guess the method name". Even in rich IDEs like RubyMine, the utter lack of context in any given file in rails leaves programmers typing their best guess of a method name, running the tests, rinse, repeat. This solution, while creative and laudable, solves a problem…

I have exactly this frustration as a person coming from static languages (mostly C++) to web dev. Anybody can recommend something more comfortable? I like the concept of Vaadin, but I'd prefer something non-Java.

I'm personally very happy with golang. We are a python shop with some bit of Java on the backend and we decided to try golang to get past a few python performance hurdles. So I wrote a smallish API/data importer as a first application. The results have been fantastic. Nearly as productive as python, better in my opinion support for a functional paradigm, much faster, and of course really easy and great concurrency support. Sure python and django have a good bit more tooling and third party libs but go is gaining ground. One major hurtle I faced was the lack of a good visual debugging IDE. I'm using the go plugin for Intellij but it's not really that good. If go keeps gaining popularity and Intellij releases first class support, like they have with python ruby and node, it will really help the language ecosystem.
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