[philwelch]

Ruby on Rails. It's not even that high-level, but:

1. The number of import statements in the typical code file in the typical Rails app is anywhere between 0 and 3, heavily weighted towards 0. Turns out you can metaprogram class-loading behavior in high-level languages and it just seems to work.

2. It's rare to find good places where exception handling is the best way to go in Rails, except for debugging purposes, in which case the default Rails behavior--to render the exception in a 500 if you're running in developer mode--is usually what I want.

3. Aren't try/catch blocks exception handling?

4. `.each do |e|`; `.map do |e|`. I can handle those on my own.

OK, there's serious shit you can't write in Ruby, but languages like Scala and Clojure are equally high-level, probably even more high-level, and yet have better performance and JVM integration.

Still, I understand there are legitimate reasons you'd use a language like Java, and given a language like Java, I can understand that you'd want an IDE to automate the drudgery. But I still don't like IDE's, because they're an ugly solution to a problem that doesn't need to exist. If I can concisely express what I want to do in my code to Eclipse, I should fundamentally be able to express the same idea just as concisely in the code itself.

[kmkemp]

I'm mostly ignorant of Ruby, so maybe you can help me out.

1. And how exactly do they get away with that? What if you wanted to use a class that had a name conflict with a Ruby library class? Import/require are useful for namespace resolution. It seems that not having them would just be limiting your ability to name things cleanly.

2. Well sure, exception handling shouldn't be the rule, but how often you use them isn't usually a language concern (except maybe with Java and checked exceptions). Nonetheless, when you do use them, having your IDE give you shortcuts to write the boilerplate code is a plus.

[philwelch]

> What if you wanted to use a class that had a name conflict with a Ruby library class?

I just try to avoid going around calling my classes things like "Fixnum" or "Array".

Seriously though, this kind of thing is all set up at the framework level, though you do sometimes have explicit requires for external libraries (gems) that you bring in. The Ruby standard library isn't that big, and Rails' libraries are named and namespaced intelligently and pretty much sit in the background without having to be explicitly invoked too much.

It helps that the main source of Ruby libraries is RubyGems, most RubyGems have a class or namespace named after the name of the gem, and there's a canonical source of RubyGems that doesn't allow you to use the name of gems that already exist.

> Well sure, exception handling shouldn't be the rule, but how often you use them isn't usually a language concern (except maybe with Java and checked exceptions). Nonetheless, when you do use them, having your IDE give you shortcuts to write the boilerplate code is a plus.

I guess Ruby exception handling just doesn't have much boilerplate code.