In 2007 _why released Shoes. A rich framework for writing and packaging cross-platform desktop applications in Ruby.

It still seems remarkable to me that a solo human on 20-years-older hardware built this without the assistance of AI.

The proposal is powerful. Take lines of code in one language and make a real thing on your computer.

That proposal has not aged. If anything it is more powerful than ever. _why combined this hacking magic with a gorgeous and tasteful DSL that has stood the test of time. Think of your app in Ruby, with Shoes. It is intuitive beyond anything else I’ve seen for desktop.

I maintained the modern Shoes-implementation-attempt “Scarpe” with Noah Gibbs from 2022-2025 when he passed away. Now it’s just me. We were an inseparable team. Noah fully believed in my vision and was able to combine that with his decades of engineering prowess into a rock-solid, configurable, flexible and scalable framework.

We still stare at a mountain of issues. Elements of the DSL not yet implemented. Bringing HacketyHack back. ACTUAL PACKAGING.

But we’ve planted our flag and committed to Scarpe for the long haul.

I’d like to introduce my cofounder Philippe Dubois. We’ve been working very closely together for a year and a half. Born and raised in Lyon, he brings new flare and engineering skill that we need on the project.

Since he started working with this on me we have released a new version that no longer requires weird configs for bundle install to work. WE CRACKED PACKAGING!!! (Still need to battle test). And as I write this we are working to make Scarpe run on the hundreds of known Shoes example applications in our database.

Even if you don’t know Shoes; your agent does. Since it was publicly blogged about and documented for YEARS, every coding agent out there is well versed in the DSL.

I love the idea of you learning Shoes and building your applications from scratch by hand. But if you want to get started fast, gem install Scarpe today and ask your agent to build you a desktop app and run it with the Scarpe command.

You won’t be disappointed.

Here’s the inaugural blog post from Philippe about this work. You will hear more from him in the future. https://schwadlabs.io/blog/resurrecting-whys-dream

Cheers,

Schwad