I'm not so disillusioned with Rubymotion, yet. But there are strange memory errors, and stuff that just doesn't work, or I haven't figured out "how it's supposed to work," yet.
I am more disillusioned with iPhone development in general. It's like a trip back to the 1980s, and the nineties are more than over, man! As some would have it, Ruby may be "friendly" to some. It's a nightmare to others like me, who are advocates for type safe languages and a guy who worked on functional languages, like Haskell, back in the day.
Originally, we embarked on type safety to get attain efficiency of execution from the languages in which we wrote code. In all, that was a good goal, but the ultimate benefit of that effort is now the ease with which the development process has improved. The development tools, e.g. Eclipse, are excellent at analyzing the code on the fly, good at making suggestions of method names you desire, and proper argument matching by type, and leads to much faster development process, eliminating stupid errors as a result of the dynamic compiling the IDE employs. And refactoring the code is just a few mouse clicks away, brilliant!
Ruby throws most of that progress into the trash can, and you end up with typeOs and argument mismatches so far down the line that you have write test for everything, just to make sure you typed it correctly. And you can still get burned way down in the process when you fire up the app, because your development tools don't have a friggin clue about what is to transpire. That process is ridiculously long.
I started on this project with Rubymotion because I have an Android App that I did in Java, as one does. It took me a week to learn enough intricacies about the process, and with the help of a good IDE and its integration with excellent documentation, I had a functioning Android app with maps in about a week. It was a relative breeze.
My app contains a lot of non-ui logic, so after a failure of trying to convert the Java to Objective-C (you can read about that here), I decided to go with RubyMotion, based on the fact that I could get a common base of code that will work for both the Android and iOS.
I've been at this Ruby crap for months, converting my Java code to Ruby. The IDE I'm using is RubyMine, which is good, but it's Ruby, so it can only be so good, and that's just not Eclipse and Java. It's been a trying experience. As a result, I have Rspecs for everything, basically which is the result of just trying to clear the typeOs and the type mismatches that the IDE can't do anything about before I get into the arduous iPhone/Rubymotion process.
Objective-C is the most inelegant language I've ever come across. Anyway, I bought Rubymotion, and it's just been a frustrating experience. Rubymine just doesn't play well with it. The debugger sucks, and is basically useless. However, its consolation is that it's better than Xcode and Obj-C. And the REPL, which is a dynamic Ruby expression evaluator in the context of the running app, is somewhat useful, except that I have so many "puts" statements in my code for debugging purposes, trying to read the result of an evaluated expression in REPL is like trying to catch chickens in the yard if you can't stop the scrolling fast enough. Also, REPL tries to print out the resulting object and if the object is large the whole thing crashes with a malloc_error, which is some throwback from the 1970s, but I digress.
The whole write code, compile, fire up the simulator, fire up the app, crash sometimes with or without an assembler dump reminds me of a time when I would accidentally drop a boxed program of punch cards on the floor, or when the card reader would chew your cards like a mad dog. Alas, you guys are probably too young to remember that, and some of you'll probably say I'm too old to be doing this stuff.
In any case, I'm hoping that some of the problems with Rubymotion can be gotten around and that the Android thing will work. I'm kind of betting on that. I've seen a lot of software come into being and improve, even Microsoft's horrible crap, given enough time. I still have faith.
Cheers,
Dr. Polar Humenn
