Absolutely supportive of both Rick and you.

.. what Rick says is certainly true for the kind of tools and libraries that he builds and took his points when he delivered his opinion on C-sharp... back in time at the beginning of the Net setup.

IronPython doesn't offer very much that .Net does not have, but what it offers it does without requiring the complexity that .Net requires. For me, it offers a cleaner development language, where I can concentrate on the meat of what I am doing, rather than the trivia of casting, the various rules of class inheritance (sometimes simpler is better: viz. the iPhone), and so forth. And everyone is different:

... Definitely on you for this one as well. Software development is not an issue of compilers-were-dumb-or-heavy-but-they-have-improved-do-not-need-the-interpreters-of-the-old-time-anyome. It requires both :)

Depending on the kind of application you build and the way you build them. There are smart people on both sides of the equation. I believe however that MS made a strategic-political mistake to let python and other high end interpreters à la ruby to become essentially linux stuff.

The replacement of the old VB is IMHO... python.