I had my opinion of NetBeans done already. I had used it, and it had earned its badge. NetBeans is slow. Slower than a snail. With a broken hip. Standing in syrup. Cemented solidly to a piece of primary rock. It’s also got a horrible name.
This is still the case of course. But something happened over the period of the last two years or so that, while I was aware of it in a peripheral vision, wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if sort of way, I never really thought would pan out. NetBeans is still its barely passable self (by which I mean that it’s actually a respectable IDE; it’s not just great in the same way that other IDEs are to me), but NetBeans 6 has now got the best god damn understanding of Ruby of anything in the world, and it really does work wonderfully.
For a notable Java IDE, backed by Sun even, it seems like something totally out of left field. It’s been in the works for a while, and thanks to people like Tim Bray, Sun understands that Ruby can be beneficial to them. Tor Norbye has done an awesome job on the whole Ruby type inference engine, since implicitly-typed languages are notoriously hard to provide something as basic as sensible autocompletion for. Give the man the Nobel Peace Prize.
And that’s one more reason for me to get a faster computer.