Do ruby on rails programmers refactor?

Question

I'm a Java programmer who started programming Ruby on Rails one year ago. I like the language, rails itself and the principles behind them. But something that bothers me is that Ruby programmers don't seem to refactor.

I noticed that there is a big lack of tools for refactoring in Ruby / Rails. Some IDE's, like Aptana and RubyMine seem to offer some very basic refactoring, but nothing really big compared to Eclipse's Java refactorings.

Then there is another fact: most railers (even the pros) prefer some lightweight editors, like VIM or TextMate, instead of IDEs. Well, with these tools you just get zero refactoring (only regex with find/replace).

This leaves me this impression that rails programmers don't refactor. It might be just a false impression, of course, but I would like to hear the opinion of people who work professionally with ruby on rails.

Do you refactor? If you do, how do you do it,with which tools? If not, why not?

Answer 1

Definitely yes, there is a different reason for the tool disparity

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An IDE is more practical to construct for Java

Java's strict typing and documented grammar make it possible to write language-parsing IDE tools

Ruby's duck typing and documented-by-the-Yacc-source grammar make it quite difficult to do so.

An IDE is more needed for Java

Java's verbosity makes code-writing and code-rewriting tools desireable.

Ruby's extremely terse nature combined with the typically-no-type-declarations (of course they do appear inline with Type.new) make such things optional.

Combining the two...

So the combination of really hard to write coupled with not actually needed results in the balance tipping in favor of people's favorite editors.

Giving up vi(1) for an IDE is something I would rather not do, but I do with Java because I need the IDE to write my interface implementations and such, and the fact that it parses Java makes it useful in code completion. Since with Ruby it can't and I don't need it anyway, I stick with vi(1) and TextMate.

Summary

Since you aren't buried in code, it's possible to refactor with a few reasonable edits. But while on the subject of "other Ruby developers", my Ruby question is: why does everyone (except me it seems) use function parens? Because in a few % of situations they are needed, and so the "inconsistency" is disturbing?