MacRuby is fun! :-)

Just for a lark, I've been playing with MacRuby - an implementation of Ruby that sits on top of the Cocoa/Objective-C underpinnings of Mac OS X (and iOS, but that's a different story). I gotta say - it's one heck of a language!

I was wondering if OS X would get its Visual Basic - there's Objective Basic, but no one seems to have heard of it. (I've not played with it, but it looks good. I've just downloaded it, so I'll try it out at some point, hopefully this week.) Well, I think MacRuby might be "The Next Big Thing" in consumer "level" programming. :-)

MacRuby was initially sponsored by Apple (I don't know if it still is; I don't think so), but it is actively maintained, can use Ruby's gems and is integrated into Interface Builder. It uses a super-set of Ruby's syntax to deal with the weirdness that is Objective-C.

There's a few consumer, commercial apps in the AppStore; one of them is Redwood, "spotlight for the cloud". (Spotlight, for all you MS Windows heathens ( :-D ) users is a neat search system built into OS X. In keeping with the spotlight metaphor, its icon is a magnifying glass...) One of the more important points The Ranger Station blogger, Andre Lewis, notes is that the code is compiled - and therefore not available for perusing, as most ruby code is. Actually, if you use gems, they're not compiled; that code is still interpreted.

Anyway, I'm going to write something useful, scratch an itch, so to speak, and if I like it (and it works...), I'm going to release it. :-)

This is fun. :-)

Carolyn Ann