dev.aol.com - Ruby on Rails and the .NET Platform: Sometimes To Embrace Means You Must First Be Willing To Let Go - Comments

Thanks!

mdavidx5 — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 20:17:00 -0500

Hey Kevin,

Your thoughts are much appreciated! Thanks :)

> Curious that you've been writing about ModuleT and AIM Pages, and their inventor is now working on a Ruby on Rails project, and here you turn your attention to RoR as well! <

If I didn't know better (which I do) I would read that and think there was an obvious collaboration, but as we both know, there most definitely was not. I would use the term "weird", but then again, I would almost venture to state that at this stage of the game, it would have been more surprising to discover that he *WASN'T* working on a RoR project. These days, isn't everybody? ;-)

> The illustration of the difference between statically-typed and dynamically-typed languages would be an excellent tutorial for beginning programmers. I've never seen a clearer description of that.

And here I was worried it may have been a bit too cloudy, or pushed a little too hard on some of the apparent connections. Am glad to see that you feel otherwise. Again, your thoughts are *MUCH* apprecicated!

--
/M:D

M. David Peterson
http://mdavid.name | http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2354 | http://dev.aol.com/blog/3155

a remarkable post

kevinfarnham1 — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:23:53 -0500

mdavid, this is a remarkable post. The illustration of the difference between statically-typed and dynamically-typed languages would be an excellent tutorial for beginning programmers. I've never seen a clearer description of that.

Meanwhile, Ruby on Rails is on the move within AOL as well: see Kevin Lawver's "Bring Me Your 48x48 Buddy Icons" post is the latest I've heard about it. The new creation must be getting close to a beta stage, since it's supposed to be announced or demoed at the South-by-Southwest Interactive conference in just over two weeks (March 9-13).

Curious that you've been writing about ModuleT and AIM Pages, and their inventor is now working on a Ruby on Rails project, and here you turn your attention to RoR as well!

Ruby on Rails and the .NET Platform: Sometimes To Embrace Means You Must First Be Willing To Let Go

mdavidx5 — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:03:15 -0500

Ruby, and in particular, Ruby on Rails has caught the development world by storm. So much so that Sun Microsystems, through the encouragement and assistance of Tim Bray (amongst others), broke away from their traditional "Java is all you need" campaign, hiring Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the developers of the JRuby project, encouraging them to continue forward with their quest to bring the Ruby language to the Java platform.

Of course, never ones to miss a "me too" opportunity ;-), Microsoft followed suit by hiring John Lam, the developer of RubyCLR, a .NET <-> Ruby compatibility bridge. As he describes,

I’ve decided to stage a friendly takeover of Microsoft. As of January, 2007 my new work address will be Building 42 at Microsoft. I’ll be working in the CLR team to help bring the love of dynamic languages out to the statically typed heathens :)

That said, Ruby is not the only dynamic language to catch the corner of the Redmond-based Giant's eye, who had several years prior hired Jim Hugunin the developer of both JPython (Python runtime for the Java platform) as well as IronPython (Python runtime for the .NET platform.) In addition, he was the primary developer and architect of AspectJ, something in which my good friend and partner in hacking (the good, *legal* kind) crimes, Russ Miles both (quite literally ;) wrote the book on, to then find inspiration in other areas of Aspect-Oriented Programming, something that would ultimately lead to us teaming up to develop AspectXML (Russ developing the Java integration engine, myself, the XSLT weaving engine) which now sits as the foundation of the AtomicXML project in which I wrote about recently.

Of course, while there are plenty of other languages and people driving things forward, in many ways, you might suggest that the creations of Jim Hugunin (and therefore, Jim himself) sit at the very foundation of the future Microsoft language and platform development. As was reported by eWeek in August,

Microsoft is working on a phased approach to enhancing its support for dynamic languages on the company's .Net platform.
Jim Hugunin, creator of the IronPython language and a development leader on Microsoft's CLR (Common Language Runtime) team, told eWEEK that Microsoft is working to help usher in support for dynamic languages on top of the CLR in a variety of levels or phases.
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