[melling]

Perhaps the Go language will help the distraction-junkie. Build times of seconds, even for very large projects.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2976630/why-does-go-compi...

[mattmanser]

Compiling's not the totality of the problem.

I switch between the two modes this article describes quite regularly.

Reflecting on it other things cause me to go into distraction mode are:

- Not sufficiently planning out boring changes (That's easy! Get stuck as I realise I've done it wrong. 1 hour later, oh, I'm reading HN, how did that happen?)

- Having to write large, but simple objects or CRUD code

- A change or bug that requires picking apart poorly written code. Refactoring helps me stay focused but that often feels like procrastination.

- Using a library I don't know well but is documented poorly

- Trying to get OAuth authentication working (every single bloody time, I hate it)

- Having to modify any existing javascript even if I wrote it, I find js so hard to re-parse. function, function, function, function, function, function. I can't pick out the flow of the code. One of the reasons I've never got on with Lisp either I think.

[secoif]

This is also a benefit of interpreted languages like Ruby or JavaScript.

[davidcuddeback]

Not necessarily. It can take a long time to load a large project, including any Rails applications. A typical Rails application can take about 30 seconds to load (that's any time you run a Rake task, launch a server, run unit tests, etc) and unit test runs can typically take a few minutes, often times more than 10 minutes for large applications. If you use a test server, such as Spork, the load time largely goes away for running your tests, but there's still a few seconds of startup time. Just because a language doesn't have an explicit "compile" step doesn't mean its void of compiling-related problems.

[getsat]

> A typical Rails application can take about 30 seconds to load

Typical? Wtf kind of codebases have you been working on?

The largest Rails app I've worked on had 250 models and 200 controllers. It took 12 seconds to load the Rails environment on Ruby 1.8.

Rails 3.1+ on 1.9.3 is pretty darn fast, even for medium-sized apps (50+ models).