Microsoft cuts loose Iron languages Microsoft has officially ended a half-decade flirtation with building its own .NETized scripting languages, and it lost a languages guru to Google in the process. The company has handed code and project responsibility for IronRuby and IronPython to "the community," six years after it started the projects and then stuck them in …
"... six years after it started the projects and then stuck them in limbo."
How many times has Microsoft done something like this? To satisfy a marketing need -- "Look! We're contributing and helping and opening up and ... everything!" -- but it is just a diversion. Is there a list somewhere (Foley perhaps?) of all the products/projects/proposals/outreachs/etc. that Microsoft has initiated, with the end of sucking up people's time and attention, and to no useful result?
I have to think that everyone would do best to just treat every utterance by Microsoft like they would something from a startup. Until you show us finished usable product that actually is worth our time, you are just moving your lips while blowing steam.
Hey, I already lose enough time to Freecell. Why should I play any more Microsoft games?
"Hugunin didn't say what his new job at Google involves, but that he would be programming on the server-side using Java."
Would that be programming for Future Virtual Reality Presentations, Jim?
We would like to know to Source Code in XSSXXXX, which is a Well of Ravenous Excitable Streams. :-)
A cryptic message, El Reg, solely designed for BetaTesting Advanced Natural Intelligence Capture Systems and Virtual Machinery Processing of Input through Output to Informative Imaginative IntelAIgent Share....... and Virtual Zeroday Vulnerability Care, aka Cyber Protection.
"the .NET Micro Framework, which was once the hope for "smart" watches endorsed by Bill Gates."
Lol. Another shining example of the tech visionary that is Bill Gates. So these "smart watches" were chucked on the same pile as Bob, Mira, Tablet PCs and all the other "visions" he had.
*chuckle*
I've never quite understood WHY such well-rounded, elegant, powerful yet minimalist languages as Python ever needed to be hitched to .Net in the first place. I can't speak for Ruby because I don't know it very well, but certainly both of them are already perfectly good little OO languages with as much or as little abstraction as you may want/need already built-in there. This extends nicely already across all platforms.
Bolting .Net onto everything (bizarrely, they even had a go at COBOL and LISP too, I gather)? It isn't very sane or useful, surely? If someone knows better, please enlighten me. I'd love to know.
I saw some nice IronPython examples years back but thought that they couldn't do anything more than regular Python already did in fewer lines. It also seemed excruciatingly slow.
But I think I'm about to say that the article was a little unfair to Microsoft. Specifically, "They came from that part of Microsoft's brain that cannot accept technologies invented elsewhere. Microsoft is compelled to build its own versions of things that already exist, optimizing them for, and integrating them with, the Windows platform."
It was really just the opposite -- an attempt to make languages that originated elsewhere (and, for the most part, on other systems) first-class development citizens on windows. Not so different from the way that Jython allows python developers to use and run on the JVM.
Microsoft are often jerks about such things (Canvas support? Why don't we try to cram Silverlight down everyone's throat's instead...) but I don't think this was one of those times.
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