back to article 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 …

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  1. mego
    Jobs Horns

    Hah

    >>The company has handed code and project responsibility for IronRuby and IronPython to "the community,"<<

    Translation: we couldn't be arsed doing it, lets give it to the sheep and let them fix it.

  2. Notas Badoff
    Gates Halo

    Not that old FUD thing, but the new beFUDdle thing?

    "... 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?

  3. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Sticky Sweet CabalAIntelligence, Venus Rampant

    "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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      The title is required, and must contain more than just a question mark.

      Err, /what?/

      1. The BigYin

        @Anon

        You're new, aren't you?

  4. Bilgepipe
    Gates Horns

    Lolz

    "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*

  5. Sam Liddicott

    What if google switch to .net

    What if google switch to .net for android?

    Will Larry change his mind, will Billy get out his lawyers?

  6. The BigYin

    Translation

    Does "dynamic languages in general on .NET" mean "making .Net as incompatible with non-MS technologies as possible"?

  7. Bill Neal
    Joke

    Metal Gear?

    IronPython would have been a much better name for Solid Snake

  8. Gilgamesh

    I'm sure this will come as a terrible blow ...

    to both IronRuby and IronPython developers

    assuming there are two developers in the world that use IronRuby or IronPython

  9. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Good

    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.

  10. pj3090

    I can't believe it...

    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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