I remember the occasion well, I was having a quiet lunch (as a break from all the dog-walking and cat-stroking) in a very pleasant little restaurant on the fringes of Dartmoor. The sun shone merrily, the wine flowed freely and I was contemplating a carefree afternoon (followed by an equally carefree week, month, year and life) when all of a sudden I blurted out the aforementioned damn’ fool comment.
From across the other side of the table, I gradually became aware of two fried-egg-like objects staring back at me. These were the eyes of one Dermot Hogan – a software developer of no mean qualities and an even meaner cheque book (which explains why the lunch was on me). I expected him, at any moment, to snap his fingers, slap me on the back, shout, “By Jove! What a spiffing idea, old fellow” and “Bring us your finest bottle of Dom Perignon, landlord!” Instead of which, he just sat there staring at me with those fried-egg eyes and a forkful of peas poised precariously on their way to his open mouth.
After a pause into which you could have driven a coach, horses and a regiment of horse guards, he eventually said (having scoffed the forkful of peas the instant before), “Er, what’s Ruby?”
With those innocent sounding words was begun a train of events which was ultimately to lead to a programming project of such mind-numbing proportions that even the dog now looks at me askance as though in doubt of my sanity. Truth to tell, I was, at that time, a mere Ruby novice myself. I’d heard of the language, thought it had a nice name, tried to give it a go and didn’t enjoy the experience – not because of the language itself but because of the IDEs, or lack thereof, with which one could program it. It would be invidious to name names and so I shall silently pass over the sources of my frustrations. Suffice to say that, having been used to programming with Visual Studio, the best IDE I could find for Ruby just didn’t cut the mustard.
Well, by the time we’d laid the desserts to rest and had moved onto the coffee and petit fours we were already babbling excitedly about the Ruby IDE for Visual Studio which we were going to create. I knew precious little about Ruby, Dermot knew next to nothing about integrating a language into Visual Studio – and on the basis of our combined ignorance, we decided it should be an absolute doddle!
Well, here we are, almost a year later, and now so clued up on both the mysteries of Ruby and the baroque complexities of the Visual Studio SDK that I can say with a good degree of certainty that if we’d known then what we know now I’d have retired to keep bees rather than embarked upon so foolhardy a project.
Visual Studio is complicated! (Forgive the exclamation marks, but I feel an irresistible urge to say that again, more forcefully) – Visual Studio is complicated!!! Merely finding your way around the SDK is a labour that should not be undertaken lightly. Creating an editing and debugging environment with all the scope and syntax sensitive information needed to support a type-free (kind of), hugely dynamic language like Ruby is an insanely ambitious project. Believe me, days off were cancelled from day one; evenings went out shortly after; weekends have disappeared long since and we are starting to think seriously about doing away with the nights too. Well, who needs sleep when there’s so much coding to do?
Anyway, somehow or other we seem to have managed to keep on schedule. We’d always planned to have version 1.0 of our free Personal Edition available by the end of the year – and it will be (I’m testing the release candidate at the moment), with the commercial Developer Edition available early in 2007 – and it will be (all being well, and fingers crossed, it’ll be out before the end of January).
If you can’t wait that long, the current beta of the Personal Edition is available for download now:
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Steel-Download-and-Change-Log
Ah well, can’t hang around nattering. There’s the dog to be stroked, the cat to be programmed and lots of hand-crafted code to be taken on its afternoon walk.
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