JavaScript is such an interesting language isn’t it? If we keep it to the books and have lots of global variables and functions it makes it really easy to write an intelligent JavaScript editor (I’m thinking of Aptana and Eclipse’s native JavaScript Editor). If you’re of the “IDE’s are cool” mindset, these editors are incredibly valuable because they can show you nicely structured outlines of your application — complete with collapsing menus for nested objects.

Where this seems to completely break down is when you start doing something even remotely interesting with JavaScript. For example, if I wrap my application in a self-invoking function — poof! my outline is gone. Heaven forbid I do anything requiring closure.

Do the developers in the audience have their preferred editors? I’ve since just found myself using Textmate for all my JavaScript development as it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is (don’t mistake that statement for it being just a text editor though).

What about folks who use other dynamic languages? How do your IDE’s cope with the complexity of giving accurate outlines? Is it really that hard to write an advanced editor for a dynamic language?

Python folks… Ruby folks… I’d love to hear your thoughts.