Unveiling the big leap in Ruby 3.3’s IRB

Ruby's REPL, irb has gotten a ton of love over the past few years, essentially obviating most popular debuggers in the process. This year is another huge leap forward.

This is my favorite item in this list because I didn't even know show_source existed:

The show_source command has always been an essential tool for many IRB users, especially for debugging. This year it received two enhancements that will make it even more useful:

• You can now use -s to get the method’s super definition if it has one
• It can now display private methods too

Awesome!

Having a great REPL is essential in dynamic languages, so quality-of-life improvements have a direct impact on the speed and quality of feedback during development.