I’ve struggled for months to learn to love Xcode but I have finally come to the conclusion that this is never going to happen. At first I wondered if this was just a personal prejudice. However, I am coming to realise that, whereas most Visual Studio users love their IDE, Xcode users tend to be a little less passionate about theirs.

Take, for example, Laurent Sansonetti, the creator of MacRuby – an implementation of the Ruby language that runs on the Objective-C runtime on OSX. Sansonetti has since developed the RubyMotion for deploying MacRuby programs on iOS. You’d think that, with that Mac-centric background, Sansonetti would be able to muster at least a bit of enthusiasm for the Mac’s ‘default’ IDE. Not so. I’ve just been reading the RubyMotion FAQ and the section on Xcode is not so much a case of ‘damning with faint praise’ as just ‘damning’. Here it is:

Do you support Xcode?

While you can certainly configure an Xcode workspace to program in RubyMotion, we do not provide any support for Xcode out-of-the-box. We do not believe that Xcode makes a good environment for Ruby development (or development in general).

Oh well, at least it’s not just me. Now back to Visual Studio. Joy!