Hi Thomas,

No humble pie required: that's the way it looked then, and there was no indicating things were otherwise at MS. I never thought they would go back on their word that all 3 dynamic languages would be first-class .Net languages. It turns out the decision was made before the announcement, which mirrors the amount of trust I have in MS as the keeper of the languages in which I develop.

Yes, IPy is a faithful implementation. For me that is a negative, not a positive. Languages need to grow to meet the needs of new contexts, and .Net is a new context.

As to how I'm taking it: open source projects are credible to the degree they are corporate-supported. Boo is supported (Rodrigo works for Unity, the game development framework company, and Boo is the basis for their scripting language, and all Unity developers have 20% time for non-Unity development). And if VFP.Net were to be resurrected, I could get multi-company support for it, probably within 24 hours. I prefer to put eggs in a basket in which I have a reasonable degree of trust, and with regard to development tools, MS does not meet that criterion, except with regard to languages that don't meet my needs.

best,

Hank

>>I follow the IronPython list and several of the guys on that list are very concerned. They believe that IronRuby is dead and IronPython will soon join. What is taking it's place - JavaScript. I can't believe it! I can't believe it!
>
>Well, this was one of my ugly scenarios of oracle buying MySql with the added hardware (Sun) and language (java) divisions...
>On the front of hosted dynamic languages the competition slowed down a bit - just enough so anti trust does not get riled up.
>And it started with cutbacks on the java side IMHO - not that this makes the MS decision more palatable.
>
>I guess the big bad boy to defend against is again google with Chrome, V8 and Node.js starting to get traction -
>and to be honest, I have learned new bits about OOP and ways of coding by trying out Python,
>that javascript feels like a big step back - having to reimplement "global" modularization as a fucntion also coded
>in support libraries [CommonJS/require] is a step further back then the OOP hat foxpro acquired with vfp.
>
>But to be honest, I know that I have not really thought and tested the concept of nonblocking IO event based fwk -
>I still view at least the "workers" as process based instead of thread oriented, but it might lead to better MP scalability
>- but some of the node.js devs think this a major paradigm shift. It seems similar to some event loop manipulation way back in the DOS days.
>
>Will be interesting to see if IPy joins the "not supported here" list at MS - while not turning me completely off .Net
>(It is nicer compared to the java VM), it motivates to write with clear boundries in mind to be able to switch on a MS whim.
>
>>I just thank my self everyday for not going with .Net. I would have taken to IronPython like a duck takes to water (I really like python) and right now I would have been again concerned about my future. I use to to think I could count on MS. I have lost all trust in MS. It wouldn't surprise me if C++ was dropped. After all how many MS C++ developers are there?
>
>At least over here in europe, CPython alone is not a big item - you have to work in java or dotnet runtimes most of the times.
>And IPy has surpassed Jython, without tarnishing its python roots with unwanted additions to the language.
>In this respect IPy was much better than expected - perhaps too good ?
>
>>I wonder how Hank Fay is handling all of this?
>Just a few days ago I urged him to move more to Ipy and less to Boo - pass me some humble pie, please...
>
>regards
>
>thomas