It's odd to complain about the first run not working, when the first run is significantly earlier. I'd also say the interactivity of Pry and binding.pry more than compensates for anything lost by not having a compilation step.
100% going from Java+IntelliJ to Ruby+VSCode was shocking. In regards to tooling, the developer experience is way behind with Ruby. Sure there’s a lot more boilerplate to look at, but with tolls you don’t actually end up writing much. And then you get refactoring tools that are actually super useful and robust.
Prototyping in Java is as fast as prototyping in Ruby once you understand how to use the tools equivalent to Pry in Java, and standard types instead of rolling your own types. JIT isso fast today the 20ms required to JIT what you type is immaterial.
Not strictly Java, but Groovy is a great environment to prototype on the JVM. Prototyping was lightning fast and turning it into Java code was pretty quick too. There’s great IDE support for it too (IntelliJ’s Groovy scratches).
These days Kotlin is also pretty good. Perhaps not quite as fast to prototype but there’s little need for converting afterwards.
Yes, add an environment like BeakerX [1] (essentially, Jupyter notebooks) and it's quite amazingly good to figure out your approach even if you intend to write Java.
