IronRuby plans revealed on .NET Rocks

Richard and Carl interviewed me a few weeks ago on .NET Rocks! We had a fun discussion about a whole range of topics from my experience emigrating to the Republic of Microsoft to why Ruby the language is important.

The interview is now live on their site. Enjoy!

Comments

[SoftMind]

Hello John,

By any chance, can i get a link to read the text matter of this interview. Broadband is not so powerful here and its not convinient to download the movie and watch.

Thanks

[John Lam]

I believe that they post transcripts of the talks a few weeks after the show.

[WebReservoir]

Can someone kindly post highlighting points or refer a link or blog based on the topics of the interview.

Thanks

[DotNetGuy]

Ya,
A great Idea to read either blog or article. A nice way to quench thirst for IronRuby.

I'M waiting

[mattd]

John,

You might want to watch your usage of the word 'right'. You seem to have a very bad habit; listen to your DNR interview. There are times where you must say it around 10+ times a minute...

[M. David Peterson]

@mattd,

>> You might want to watch your usage of the word 'right'. You seem to have a very bad habit; listen to your DNR interview. There are times where you must say it around 10+ times a minute... <<

Are you kidding me?! Instead of suggesting what you did or did not like about the show, you instead chose to count the number of times John said "right" in a minute?

Firstly, why?

Secondly, out of shear and morbid curiosity as I listened to the show I paid a bit more attention to see if, in fact, John said the word "right", or any word for that matter enough times to actually notice the fact that he kept saying it and I'll be honest: I didn't notice anything even close to something that could be viewed as "why does he keep saying that word!"

To each his own, but come one!

To John: Thanks for the extended info! Interesting show :) Glad to hear the coverage you gave to Peter Fisk and VST. He definitely deserved both the attention and the credit, so good on ya for giving him both! :)

[John Lam]

thanks for the props david! I just listened to it again as well. I do use right as a crutch word and I generally try to avoid saying it too much.

Btw I am typing this on an iphone at the apple store - not as hard as some other people make it out to be!

[Dave]

John,

I am excited to see IronRuby in a couple weeks at OSCON. You spoke a little about its progress in the interview.

How is it going? Is it very far along? Do you think it will be able to run Rails any time soon? Is there a date you are shooting for to release IronRuby 1.0?

Thanks for all your hard work,
Dave

[M. David Peterson]

@John,

>> thanks for the props david!

Oh, there's plenty more where that came from. You folks are doing some amazing work!

>> I just listened to it again as well. I do use right as a crutch word and I generally try to avoid saying it too much.

If I was forced to remove even an 1/8th of my crutch words from my vocabulary I wouldn't no how to communicate. Just like the language we prefer to code in, in my own opinion crutch words are part of who we are.

>> Btw I am typing this on an iphone at the apple store - not as hard as some other people make it out to be!

Nice! Russ Miles just finished up one of our apps for the iPhone (a streaming media player) and we're getting ready to push it out in alpha. I'll append the URI to this thread to check out when it's live. The next step, of course, will be to take that same app and get it running via Silverlight :D

[M. David Peterson]

As mentioned: The iPhone version: http://rage.fm/playlist/?playlist=http://rage.fm/demo/ume-sample-1.xspf and the in browser demo (Safari seems to be the only one that renders it properly) > http://rage.fm/playlist/demo < These will both be going down by the end of the day, but wanted to follow-up as promised. If you happen to have taken that sweet little gem home with you from the Apple store, would *LOVE* to discover whether or not you were able to get it to render and play properly.

We're looking forward to the first alpha release of IronRuby such that we can get this same app built out for Silverlight using the language that most of us prefer to code in when given the choice ;-) OSCON's only a week away. WooHoo! :D

[John Lam]

A couple of things that I should write up as a separate blog post, but here they are:

1) Our release at OSCON won't have any Silverlight support in it ... the reasons why are long and complicated (but mostly resource constraint driven). We will integrate into Silverlight down the road at some juncture.

2) Our implementation is coming along; I think folks will be pleased by performance. But library support is weak at best, and I'm trying to improve that as quickly as possible now that our core method dispatch engine is up and running.

[M. David Peterson]

@John,

>> 1) Our release at OSCON won't have any Silverlight support in it

Drat! Well, Python via IronPython still puts a smile on my face, so life could definitely be worse ;-)

>> Silverlight down the road at some juncture.

Great! :D

>> 2) Our implementation is coming along; I think folks will be pleased by performance.

Performance is good.

>> But library support is weak at best,

I assume by "library support" you are referring to the core Ruby libraries? Seem this is the obvious possibility, but it also seems best to clarify.

>> and I'm trying to improve that as quickly as possible now that our core method dispatch engine is up and running.

Well Ruby and its related libraries took just a tad bit longer ;-) to build out than the five or so months you've been on Redmond campus, so I think some slack cut your direction is probably in due order. None-the-less, keep up the great work! These are exciting times, and this project holds the potential to completely change the face of development for MSFT-related technologies, so it seems best that you are taking the "lets do this right the first time approach."

[SoftMind]

Hi to all IronRuby Lovers here.,

Let me tell something that always fascinates me with this great IronRuby Project.

(1) Ruby is simple to learn than C#, so mass developers will join us sooner, making IronRuby Community stronger and Powerful. I am confident that very soon even C# developers will give this IronRuby a second thought of joining this Dynamic language.

(2) IronRuby comes with more advantages like....

(a) .Net 3.5 framework
(b) Good IDE like VS2008/VWD
(c)Advantages of Rails with creamy inbuilt toppings of Ajax, LINQ and perhaps much more.

(3) A steady and established support from IronRuby Team, backed with Microsoft Name.

I am waiting for OSCON. July 26 IronRuby session of Mr. John Lam to unleash the secrets of IronRuby.

IronRuby is a dream with a Cream.

Cheers till then.

[Rob Loach]

Hey John,

Once again on .NET Rocks? Haha, nicely done.

Cheers!

[Carl Franklin]

The transcript is now available at http://perseus.franklins.net/dotnetrocks_0254_john_lam.pdf

It was available earlier, but just not posted for some reason. We have a very fast turnaround time on transcripts now (3 days).

[Otan]

I love Ruby so much, and so, I'm glad Microsoft now supports the Ruby language. But considering how Microsoft handles business, I'm afraid this is gonna be just an instance of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". I don't want Ruby to end up like a dump of shit because of Microsoft evil minds. So my message to Microsoft is please, play nice with Ruby. I can't find any language today that is as nice and elegant as Ruby. Don't destroy it.

I will support .net from now on as long as Microsoft doesn't destroy Ruby and its community.

That's all and thanks.

[Fredrik]

@ Otan,

Do not worry about Microsoft support for IronRuby. Microsoft is really serious about First Class Implementation Of IronRuby on DotNet.

Please find some time reading a detailed blog of Scott Guthrie in july about IronRuby.

He has clearly mentioned full serious support of Ruby via his comments on blogs.

They would have NOT hired John Lam for porting Ruby to .net, if they were not at all serious.

IronLisp is now also available on codeplex. At this stage dotnet DLR is growing only because of implementing good languages.

Hope this helps.