IronRuby is not “dead”—just very, very tiny…
I had to add IronRuby to my Word 2010 custom dictionary in order to write this article without proofing errors. So, clearly the Office Team has not heard of IronRuby. John Lam is IronRuby as far as I’m concerned. But, back in the 11th month of 2009, he writes in “Passing the torch”:
The IronRuby project is still going strong, and is in the capable hands of Jimmy Schementi. It’s heading towards a 1.0 release (0.9.2 today), and Jimmy is going to lay out what that roadmap looks like at RubyConf on Friday.
Then, in the 8th month of 2010, Jimmy Schementi in “…the future of Jimmy and IronRuby” he writes:
…my last day as a Microsoft employee was July 23rd, 2010… Overall, I see a serious lack of commitment to IronRuby, and dynamic language on .NET in general. At the time of my leaving Tomas and myself were the only Microsoft employees working on IronRuby. If this direction for dynamic languages on .NET is a path you do not want Microsoft to take, I strongly suggest you provide feedback to the team’s management directly. Also, Jason Zander runs the Visual Studio team, which IronRuby, IronPython, and the DLR happen to be a part of, and is a big proponent of these dynamic languages efforts, so provide him with your thoughts as well.
So, now, Tomáš Matoušek is IronRuby—but, unlike the salad days of John Lam, no team effort? —is this a solo deal? I’m looking at Tomáš, his Blog, and his mentions of IronRuby are very, very few. Maybe this Karl Seguin guy is right? He says:
I’m not being coy. I really think IronRuby was a bad business move and that they finally did the right thing. I do believe that they need a truly powerful dynamic language, but I think the right business move is to build their own (as much as I wish that wasn’t the case). It was naive of anyone to think otherwise. And I’m not even going to speculate what Microsoft was thinking for all those years—either they were being really dumb, or really deceitful (it really doesn’t matter anymore).
In month 6 of 2010 we have “Herding Code 84: Ex-Microsoft Developer Panel with Mike Moore, Jeff Cohen, and Scott Bellware.” This episode was one of the most scathing, constructively critical view of Microsoft in general and ASP.NET MVC in particular. Time and time again the speakers kept praising Ruby on Rails (and the Ruby language) as the supreme master of ASP.NET MVC. These are pro-Microsoft developers who clearly work with both technologies so I am unable to dismiss these rants as more tech-macho, ding-a-ling waving. I’ve heard and watched hundreds and hundreds of tech podcast episodes and there are only a handful of programs that have taken me by surprise.
So after all of the surprise I’m led to investigate IronRuby—to, maybe, run Ruby on Rails on the .NET Framework. This is probably the first time in my .NET career that I’m motivated to investigate another language with a specific task (I know I should be using F# for something…).