Here's the Ruby In Steel editing / debugging experience. Intellisense works dynamically -- as soon as you define a function, it becomes available to Intellisense. The debugging experience seems to be the standard VS one (that is, pretty darned good).

REPL functionality is provided by IRB in a console window: not ideal …

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+ | | I am:\ | | | | | | > Gregory Benford | | | | | | A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist. | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+

Which science fiction writer are you?

Joel Spolsky's review of Dreaming in Code makes the point that Chandler is yet another high-quality data point that, contrary to the initial exhortations, Open Source is not a significantly-more-productive development methodology. It turns out that Open Source is an interesting business model (somewhat to my surprise) and that free-as-in-beer …

I was struck by the statement "the version control system is a first order effect on software, along with two others - the build system and the bugtracker. Those choices impact absolutely everything else. Things like IDEs, by comparison, don't matter at all," in a post by Bill de h?ra …

Alan Zeichick points out the absurdity of the position, touted by Microsoft, that Windows Vista will "generate" \$10 billion in new revenue for the California IT industry this year. Alan observes that IT revenue means that "someone else's costs have to go up" and that it's perverse to "celebrate a …

There are those who say that American's time is past. That this great country, this bastion of ingenuity, has lost it's spark, it's insight, it's entrepreneurial spirit. To those people, I give molecular biologist Robert Bohannon, who has figured out how to mask the bitterness of caffeine in pastry, opening …

Hard on the heels of Ruby In Steel's debut, Komodo 4 was released today. This new version supports Ruby and RoR. via Binstock on Software.

I need to flash my motherboard BIOS in order to install Vista on my dual-processor desktop (I hope that will do the trick). I don't have a floppy drive anymore, not on any machine. I can't believe what a problem this has turned into. I go through my half-a-dozen rescue …

Ooh, this is tough; I've received a couple one-a-day challenges that are on things that I really do need to do. Jimmy Norton invited me into the Flickr Project 365 challenge, which is to post an image a day for a year. I am always dismayed to realize how little …

Peter Coffee, who's been providing some of the most insightful, technically-based discussions of the IT and software industries for 18 years, has left eWeekto become Director of Platform Research at Salesforce.com. This is a significant loss to the field (although I am sure a great benefit to Salesforce.com …