The Grass May Not Be Greener Yet, But The Soil Is More Fertile

 

The founder of the Ruby.NET project announced yesterday that he is leaving active development of that project and moving over to fully supporting the IronRuby effort.  Based on everything I've heard about Dr. Kelly and Ruby.NET, this is fantastic news.  Hopefully this will spurn even more activity on the IronRuby project.  Some of the important quotes from his post are:

"I've come to the conclusion that the DLR is clearly here to stay - it's becoming an even more important part of the Microsoft platform."

"I now believe that IronRuby is more likely to succeed as a production quality implementation of Ruby on the .NET platform."

That's quite an endorsement.  I have a feeling the next year or so will be the year of the DLR, we'll begin seeing it's API solidify with more and more languages being implemented on it.

That all said, IronRuby still has one major roadblock.  That is the perception of it's corporate sponsor.  I had another dev tell me this today:

"Well, ironruby is mostly being  developed inside Microsoft, so almost everyone that talks about  ironruby dev day-to-day does so on  MS-internal mailing lists. "

John Lam say it ain't so...

The ironruby-core mailing list is fairly active, and the MS-PL is OSI approved.  Yet, Microsoft has to actively be promoting these things, otherwise the outside perception will not change and IronRuby will be the less for it I fear.

What IronRuby needs more than anything right now is a large group of outside contributors, so come on down and get coding, testing, and documenting!