Ok, got it. Apologies.

If you write comprehensive unit tests for your javascript, that should effectively also work too... this is what ruby developers pretty much had to do.

We can see that over time based on the decline of ruby popularity in general, that fell out of style though. It is too easy to make a mistake and everyone was just duplicating what a compiler does for us.

I can't tell you how many hours I would sit there pair programming with other ruby developers just trying to figure out what 'type' an object is. Mind boggling, but it was good to get those high paid consulting hours.

RubyMine to the rescue.

We were using that and it is indeed excellent (along with most of JetBrains IDE products). It starts to fall down on all the meta programming we were dealing with. With a dynamic meta programmed DSL, there is only so much RM can deal with.