Sapphire In Steel

As you may well imagine, Dermot and I have been pretty much immersed in Ruby this year. Dermot has had to grapple with the outer limits of Ruby’s syntax in order to build a Ruby lexer, parser and various Ruby support tools for the Steel IDE. Meanwhile, I am writing a Ruby programming tutorial and reference guide so I too have been delving into some of the twistier little highways and byways of the language.

Many times, both Dermot’s mood and mine have varied from high elation (“Wow! Come and look at this! Isn’t this great!”) to low desperation (“Grrrr… Of all the stupid things a language could do…!”)

In the end, we’ve both come to the conclusion that the good things about Ruby by far outweigh the bad (otherwise we wouldn’t be working on this project at all!). However, we’ve also had to be realistic. In order to get Steel up and running, we’ve had to live with - and work around - some pretty curious little oddities in the Ruby language. Anyway, we got together and talked over some of our feelings about Ruby in the lead feature in this month’s Bitwise.

See if you agree…