Why Ring?
Ring is a small, dynamic, general-purpose language created by Mahmoud Fayed and first released in 2016. What sets it apart is that it takes no side: you can write imperatively, declaratively or with objects — whichever the problem actually calls for — and its natural-language syntax stays readable to people who do not write code.
The community around it is small, but qualitative and in it for the long run: 27 releases since 2016, and a Google newsgroup where any question gets a friendly, quick answer — often from Mahmoud himself.
I found it while looking for a language that would not impose a paradigm on me, and that colleagues could still read over my shoulder. Ring was both — modern, flexible, and refreshingly free of dogma.
I wrote a book about the language with Apress, presenting Ring not as yet another language, but as a genuine computational thinking tool.
Beginning Ring Programming
Written to teach the thinking, not just the syntax: how to turn a problem into a program a human being can still read afterwards.
The same year I started the Softanza library , to give Ring an industrial-strength foundation covering whatever a real project might need — Softanza is to Ring what the .NET Framework is to C#.
I put the beta into real projects, so that customer constraints and feedback — not my assumptions — would shape it: in Niger, inside a bank and a high school; in France, for a restaurant.
Two things became impossible to ignore
Ring proved flexible and well suited to a great many cases. But two limits kept surfacing:
Interpreted, like Python
Excellent for expressing ideas, but not built for heavy loads and data-intensive applications.
Backend only, on the web
For the frontend, JavaScript was the only option — and most of my clients need web applications that keep working without an internet connection.
What I did about them
For the first: using the advances in AI, I rewrote the critical parts of the library in Zig. That became the Softanza Engine — which works not only with Ring, but with any language. It is a work in progress.
For the second: I have just released RingScript, the WebAssembly port of the Ring language, making it executable inside browsers — in place of JavaScript.
Why this matters
RingScript is a critical milestone in the Softanza Project vision: to make programming easy and powerful at the same time, for anyone — while addressing serious business applications, not demos and brochure websites.
Softanza also has its own web framework, StzWeb coming soon — still in progress, and to be published soon. It makes building applications in Ring, backend and frontend, genuinely fun.