Ruby IDE for Windows 98?

[Matt Lawrence]

Mindstorms is a decent approach because you could move from graphical
programming to something like nqc

Or Forth.

-- Matt
It's not what I know that counts.
It's what I can remember in time to use.

 

[Gregory Brown]

Or Forth.

Yeah, there are a whole host of languages it supports... i think java
is another one.

There is even some Ruby code that lets you use DRb, though I've never tried it:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/lego-mindstorms/

 

[Julian Tarkhanov]

Ideally you will create a small ruby library on top of SDL that
does turtle
graphics or simple shapes and requires just a single 'require
'lib'', no
code to create a window or reference it (since that IS scary) and
start by
letting them draw things.

Which, by occasion, is going to be called Squeak (and will run
without Ruby in the first place)

 

[Julian Tarkhanov]

I am afraid that name is already taken http://squeak.org/

Amazing

This one is spot on in the context.

 

[Giles Bowkett]

After a week of trying to learn from the library, trying to learn

from the Squeak Paint program, trying to find good online
tutorials, trying to do it with MVC and Morphic - well, I gave
up without having even a canvas I can paint on with a
photoshop-pencil-like tool.

I **love** Seaside, the Squeak Smalltalk web app framework, but the
documentation is definitely the downside. Just finding good info on
the language's syntax took me some time. I tried and failed six months
ago with Cincom VisualWorks Smalltalk, too. It even took me a while to
find nice people in the Smalltalk community; the first people I asked
cursed me for not knowing Smalltalk to begin with, and then had
hysterical fits when I made a joke about it being a dead language.

Once I got it up and running, though, I fell in love with it. It's
pretty awesome. I recorded a screencast about Seaside this morning,
probably going to post and blog it tonight.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I **love** Seaside, the Squeak Smalltalk web app framework, but the
documentation is definitely the downside. Just finding good info on
the language's syntax took me some time. I tried and failed six months
ago with Cincom VisualWorks Smalltalk, too. It even took me a while to
find nice people in the Smalltalk community; the first people I asked
cursed me for not knowing Smalltalk to begin with, and then had
hysterical fits when I made a joke about it being a dead language.

Once I got it up and running, though, I fell in love with it. It's
pretty awesome. I recorded a screencast about Seaside this morning,
probably going to post and blog it tonight.

There are two books on Squeak, both of which have CD-ROMs including
(older) implementations. I have both of them. Unfortunately, they're
very much written towards the "extreme programming" philosophy, which I
find distasteful in many, though not all, respects. And, like the other
poster, I found the user interface so orthogonal to everything I've
learned and integrated into muscle memory that Squeak was simply
unusable. And IIRC the "open software" people have yet to recognize the
Squeak license as "free as in freedom". So -- three strikes and you're
out!

Now, if you want to do animation, you can do it in Squeak. If you want
to do a web app framework, you can do it in Squeak. If you want to do
algorithmic composition and synthesis, you can do it in Squeak. But why
bother when there's Blender, Rails, and Planet CCRMA?