IronRuby & DLR – Giving Developers more Language Choice in .Net

I know when I think about .Net programming languages the first thing that pops into my head is "C#" followed very closely by "VB.Net" and "managed C++" but now the number of languages I'm going to have to keep fresh in my mind is climbing. eWeek ran a story today on the availability of the first source drop for the new "IronRuby" language for .Net giving Ruby fans a new opportunity to use their favorite tool in their programmer's toolbelt to integrate Ruby with other .Net languages. Support for IronRuby was first announced back at MIX during Scott Guthrie's keynote – if you missed it you can actually go back and re-watch from your computer – but just yesterday, John Lam announced the very first pre-alpha sneak. The code right now is just a .zip download from a link off of John's blog but the plan is to get it posted onto Rubyforge later this summer and begin taking contributions from the community.

Support for IronRuby is actually the second dynamic scripting language to be supported in .Net after IronPython was released last September. This amazing step forward was enabled by the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), driven by Jim Hugunin, which adds new capabilities on top of the CLR to support dynamic languages. This investment in the DLR makes language innovation simpler since a lot of the plumbing is already taken care of. It makes it easier for language designers to innovate around the specific language features they are building. One of the quotes from Scott Guthrie's keynote at MIX that really stuck in my head was his statement that he has a hope that someday we can build such a robust language runtime that it will be possible to build a prototype language from scratch during a keynote demo. Now maybe that's stretching a bit but I do think it really shows Scott's commitment to language innovation and giving developers the powerful tools they are asking for to do their work.

The amount of buzz and positivity that these announcements seem to be generating is really impressive – Jim posted the availability of the DLR as well as the plans for new language support for JavaScript (EcmaScript 3.0), and VB in addition to Ruby and Python in the Silverlight 1.1 release and people seem very excited. Out of the 97, mostly positive, comments on Jim's post, my favorite was "Quick, where's my drool bucket?"

Perhaps that's not the most enticing visual but I think this is really a significant step forward – it's an amazing technical achievement, it gives developers more choice on language usage, it marks a high level of community engagement by taking contributions back from the developers who use the language, and provides seamless integration / interoperability with existing .Net apps built in the more "traditional" .Net languages.

Awesome!

Thanks for reading,

Adam