Though my main stream is on C#, I personally like Ruby. I was quite surprised that Microsoft started focusing on non-C family languages, those are actually coming from *nix world. Couple of years back when Microsoft released the notes about Dynamic Language Runtime which is something like Java implementation languages like JRuby, Scala. DLR has been scoped to be part of “lightweight” language runtime even in Silverlight. This was surprised me.
I was very happy when DLR would be the carrier for domain specific language (DSL). But, why did the general purpose languages like Ruby and Python are added as DLR in the .NET sandwich? Wouldn’t be like C#, VB.NET or F#? Not sure, but I was planned to use DLR for one of my custom language implementation using ANTLR.
Today I heared the news that Jimmy, the core developer of IronRuby was resigned from Microsoft. The one and only one reason is Microsoft does not want to encourage these languages in the .NET world. Jimmy wrote reasons about this (http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2010/08/start-spreading-news-future-of-jimmy.html).
Not sure about Microsoft’s roadmap. Would it move IronRuby from DLR stack to CLR stack? What would be the feature and scope of DLR? Will it be another LINQ to SQL initiative?