<s> "At the time of writing..."

Actually, IronRuby will still exist: it has a strong enough Ruby user-base to expect enough contributions to make it work. Maybe they'll even do it right by ditching the DLR and rewriting in Boo. <s> Well, I actually doubt that. But, once out of the MS legal domain, the project will at least be able to take contributions from the community. As it is now, Jimmy Schementi (sp?) who left the team to work on Wall Street, would be unable to contribute, even though he was the chief Ruby compiler developer. Once the project is on its own, he will be free to contribute.

The episode does, however, highlight the pitfalls in relying on a minor player in a large corporation. Take VFP for instance...

The ideal development environment, assuming one thinks as some do that the static languages in .Net are bloated and unnecessarily constricting, would be one with purely community involvement, but with corporate support of that community development. That way the eggs aren't in one basket; or at least if they are in one basket, there are many hands holding onto the basket, and no middle managers or lawyers making the decision about my development environment.

>Iron what?
>
>
>
>>And don't forget IronRuby: 1.0 was released with VS2010, although they don't have an IDE yet (but SharpDevelop 3.2, also just released, does have an IronRuby IDE, and of course has IronPython).
>>
>>Hank
>>
>>>>I blogged about attending a local Ruby users group meeting last night, and my Ruby newbie experiences so far...
>>>>
>>>>http://therealmattslay.blogspot.com/2010/05/ruby-on-rails-forever.html
>>>>
>>>As you work in C# already, you might have fun using Ironpython. Python makes programming fun again
>>>(if you look at it from java trenches) and is perhaps even more dynamic than vfp. Easy prompt [>>>] instead of [.],
>>>but it makes "playing" in hte undiscovered land of Dotnet easier. Give it a spin...
>>>
>>>thomas