Where can I find an actively developed lint tool for Ruby?

Question

Most of the code I write is in Ruby, and every once in a while, I make some typo which only gets caught after a while. This is irritating when I have my scripts running long

Answer 1

RubyMine (http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby) does the trick:

alt text http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/5688/31911448.png

None of the below will do all the analysis that RubyMine does.

• NetBeans Ruby pack
• Aptana RadRails
• gVIM (with syntastic plugin by scrooloose)

Each of these has the capacity to identify syntax errors such as wrong number of parentheses, too many defs, ends, braces, etc. But none will identify invalid method calls the way RubyMine does.

Here's why: it's difficult.

Since Ruby is extremely dynamic (and methods like 'c' could easily be generated on the fly), any editor that tries to identify non-existent variables/methods would need to have a large part of the entire evironment loaded and multiple program flow paths constantly tested in order to get accurate 'validity' results. This is much more difficult than in Java where almost all programming is static (at least it was when I dropped that hat).

This ability to easily generate methods on the fly is one of the reasons the community holds testing to such high esteem. I really do reccomend you try testing as well.