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Section :: Rants and Raves

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Microsoft Ruby?

Yes, there really is one. Or, anyway, there used to be…
Thursday 27 July 2006.
 

Way back in the 1980s, Microsoft embarked upon a Ruby project. This was to be a user-friendly programming language which even had its own point-and-click visual-programming user interface.

These days the language known as Ruby has no such visual programming tools as standard (though a few can be bolted onto it). So what happened to MS Ruby? Turns out the company decided to rename it and it ended up being the product known as Visual Basic.

Anyone think it ironic that just as VB is going through the lowest phase in its career (due largely to Microsoft’s faltering attempts to kill off VB, create a different language called VB .NET and hope that nobody notices), another language called Ruby is starting to occupy the same simple, user-friendly niche that VB once had all to itself?

Now, all that this latest incarnation of Ruby needs is the ‘visual’ thing…

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  • Microsoft Ruby?
    28 July 2006, by Mike Woodhouse

    Well, sort of. My recollection is that they bought "Ruby", then a sort of visual shell thingummy from Alan Cooper and mated it with an evolved MS Basic under the "Thunder" code name. (Remember the main entry point to the VB runtime? "ThunderRtMain()")

    But ironic nonetheless. Given that Matz’ Ruby is in use to some extent within Microsoft these days (from an unscientific sampling of MS blogs) it should be interesting to see how much Ruby’s profile is raised when VS proponents who use Ruby get to put the two together with Sapphire In Steel...

    • Microsoft Ruby?
      23 January 2007

      Yes, the role of Cooper’s Ruby was apparently significant in many ways but it is often overstated for political purposes.


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