Why are Ruby and Python more suited for programming outside an IDE than Groovy?

Question

This is mainly in reference to this answer in "Python vs Groovy vs Ruby?"

What makes Python and Ruby easier to develop outside an IDE?

The link also mentions debugging in the console. What is meant by that exactly?

Answer 1

Python and Ruby are easier to develop outside of an IDE than most of the JVM languages in general because they require less "overhead." I will speak primarily about Python, because that's my primary language.

In general, a Python installation has a single source for libraries (unless you're using virtualenv), and the whole project lives on the filesystem. There is no need to worry about .jar or .class files -- everything is compiled at runtime, and the .py files are your distributables.

Furthermore, Python is more concise than Java, and Groovy inherits a lot of Java's syntax (although it abstracts some things away). IDEs help to deal with boilerplate, making it less work for the programmer -- but languages without so much boilerplate don't require that help.