First, let me state the obvious that I blog as myself and my posts in no way represent the official voice of Microsoft. If you think I'm an asshole and/or an idiot, please don't take it out on Steve & Bill.
With that standard disclaimer out of the way, let me also personally and publicly praise Jim Huganin for raising the awareness inside the big house of dynamic languages in general, and obviously making IronPython happen.
With those two things out of the way, I'd love nothing more than for Patrick (who I have a lot of respect for btw) to tell me where I'm off base for thinking Ruby is the leading alternative to C#?
Personally, I don't think this is a war, but rather a very interesting time for people who use programming languages, and the cross-pollination is great for everyone.
I love what I'm able to do in Ruby.
I love what I'm able to do in C#, especially with LINQ.
Are there Ruby features I wish I had in C#? You bet!
Are the C# features I wish I had in Ruby? Yup.
And naturally, are there Scheme features I wish I had in both C# and Ruby? Absolutely.
I'm still holding out hope that both languages will subsume the feature set of a modern Lisp before I leave this mortal coil.
My biggest Lisp-related ask for C# 4.0 is hygenic macros. Maybe once I get that I can finally uninstall DrScheme.
And finally, as for a CLR-based Ruby implementation, I'd love nothing more than for it to happen (and would be willing to donate personal resources to further the cause). Larry's correct in that it's non-trivial to support call/cc on the CLR, which both Ruby and Scheme require.
Peace.
Posted
May 09 2006, 05:49 AM
by
don-box