Microsoft May Back Off of .NET Languages

An anonymous reader writes "Though Microsoft had initially made a commitment to create versions of dynamic languages that are customized for .NET, recent reports make it clear that the company may be stepping back from this plan. Much early speculation on this change in focus comes from Jim Schementi, previously the program manager in charge of Microsoft's implementation of the Ruby software known as IronRuby. Schementi reports on his blog that the team dedicated to working on IronRuby has decreased to one employee. According to Schementi, his departure from the company came as Microsoft began to display a 'serious lack of commitment' to any .NETized dynamic languages, including IronRuby."

Comments

Getting screwed in both directions

[bbtom]

So, Oracle are suing Google and making the JVM a less viable platform.

And Microsoft are pulling back on resources for IronRuby.

Looks like it may finally be time for the LLVM to step up to the plate and provide an open source alternative. Here's hoping...

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[pitdingo]

how is .net better than java?

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[not already in use]

• Unsigned data types
• Checked arithmetic (on overflow, they throw an exception)
• Support for tail calls (for Lisp, F# and other functional languages)
• Value types, these are structs that are not wrapped in an object
• VM-level support for generics
• Platform-invoke allows developers to call native code without having to write any glue in C++ using JNI, it can all be done in the managed language.
• The Common Language Specification: a spec that set the rules for interoperability across programming languages (for example: the rules for public identifier casing, handling of int vs uint and so on).
• Delegates allow user to keep a reference to a method or an instance method and invoke it. The VM also can turn any delegate invocation into an asynchronous invocation, so you can turn any method into an async method, like this: mySortFunc.BeginInvoke (array)
• Support for dynamic code generation through the Reflection.Emit API.
• A database file format allows for efficient reading of the metadata from assemblies. It does not require decompression and the database format is suitable for lazy loading.
• Attributes were special objects that could annotate most elements in the virtual machine, you could annotate classes, methods, parameters, local variables, and at runtime the VM or the runtime could do interesting things with it.
• Unsafe code (pointers) to support C++, Cobol and Fortran compilers running on the CLI.
• Native support for talking to COM-based APIs. Although mostly Windows-specific, its used to talk to Mozilla, VirtualBox and OpenOffice APIs in Linux.
• Covariance and contravariance introduced with .NET 4 make even more generic cases a pleasure to use.
• 64-bit arrays (although part of the spec, only Mono implements this).

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[not already in use]

I think the reason for this is that a lot of web programming isn't overly complex and the brevity of a dynamic language is an advantage in these cases because you can't code something up pretty quickly. Anyone writing any sort of really complex web app in a dynamically typed language is just asking for trouble.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[Bill_the_Engineer]

So, Oracle are suing Google and making the JVM a less viable platform.

What?

Oracle is suing Google for making a non-compatible VM call Dalvik that uses technology found in the JVM without paying a license. Since Google wasn't using JVM, how does Oracle's actions against Google make JVM less viable?

Looks like it may finally be time for the LLVM to step up to the plate and provide an open source alternative.

LLVM is a low level virtual machine used to optimize compiler operations and runtime linking. JVM is a high level virtual machine providing objects, garbage collection, and according to Oracle technology patented by Sun. From LLVM website:

The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies. Despite its name, LLVM has little to do with traditional virtual machines, though it does provide helpful libraries that can be used to build them.

LLVM is not a drop in replacement for JVM.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[Lunix Nutcase]

It wouldn't be a drop-in replacement but there is no reason that a Java front-end couldn't be created and combined with the LLVM JIT compiler.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[Ironhandx]

A lot of people have asked for and received said trouble.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Technically you are correct.

Except for the white elephant in the room which are these patents that Oracle owns and have tested in court already when a 2003 court settlement with Microsoft created a 10 year cross licensing agreement that allows Microsoft to develop CLR.

I'm not advocating Oracle's position, and I'm against most software patents.

I was asking how a lawsuit that doesn't affect any of the JVMs in existence, or any Java or other JVM implemented languages that run within them, make JVM less viable? I would actually think the lawsuit could make the JVM more viable since it strengthens the power of the consortium that defines the Java standard and its related technologies.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[CasperIV]

Wait? Someone likes java?

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Because there aren't a lot of good interfaces for statically-typed language to web development. Believe me, if I didn't have to rewrite half the world to write web apps in C++ with a good Apache interface, I would do it in a heartbeat.

That said, don't forget that a whole lot of development is done in ASP.NET now. It's changing.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[infamous_blah]

Thank you for this, PInvoke is probably my biggest reason in prefering .Net (mainly C#) over Java.

You can do this in Java with Java Native Access (JNA). From the JNA site:

JNA provides Java programs easy access to native shared libraries (DLLs on Windows) without writing anything but Java code—no JNI or native code is required. This functionality is comparable to Windows' Platform/Invoke and Python's ctypes. Access is dynamic at runtime without code generation.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to work on a large Ruby web app once. They had over 300,000 unit tests, totalling 6.5 million lines of code. That was just for their unit tests alone!

At first I thought that was pretty amazing, but after working with the unit tests for some time, it became painfully obvious that they were just repeatedly implementing the basic checks that would be performed by the compiler for a static language.

Perhaps 5% of the unit tests were actually testing the functionality of the software itself. The other 95% were merely ensuring that the developers hadn't made simple typos in their Ruby code, or checking that the code could handle data or objects of the wrong type, or checking that the types of variables didn't change unexpectedly, and so forth.

I soon left because of how utterly stupid it became. For each day of development, I would spend, say, an hour developing a chunk of code, and then spend seven hours writing unit tests. Had I been using a static, compiled language, I would've spent 7.5 hours writing code, 15 minutes writing some unit tests to test the actual functionality, and 15 more minutes compiling that code periodically. Yes, I would have been over 500% more productive by using a static, compiled language instead of Ruby.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[scot4875]

That's pretty much a wash, as "Controlled by Sun" isn't much better.

--Jeremy

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[Chris Newton]

If static languages are better, why is the bulk of web development done with dynamic languages?

I don’t know how much of that is reality and how much is popular perception. In any case, here are some general trends in mainstream statically-typed languages and mainstream dynamically-typed languages today that might contribute to the popularity of the latter for web development:

• The dynamic languages do not require the extra compilation steps in a build process. This probably speeds up prototyping. A lot of the web development in dynamic languages is probably done by small businesses or start-ups, and that sort of culture places a lot of emphasis on rapid prototyping.
• The dynamic languages tend to have much easier basic text processing. Basics like string formatting and regular expression parsing are a horrendous chore in languages like C++, Java and C#, relative to the trivial one-liners widely available in “scripting” languages.
• The dynamic languages also tend to have built-in support for structured data like nested hashes and arrays, where again you need to jump through hoops in typical mainstream static languages today. That kind of structured data is widely useful for defining easy interchange formats between browser-side code and server-side code. For example, on a current project, we have standardised JSON data that is accessed using several different programming languages in different contexts. In JavaScript or Python, it’s a breeze. In Java, it’s a chore.
• Integrations of popular dynamic languages with popular web servers are widely available and easy to set up. Setting up a Java-based web application is the sort of thing people write whole books about, dropping the names of half a dozen different technologies along the way.
• Likewise, integrations of popular dynamic languages with popular database systems are widely available and easy to use.
• A lot of web development projects are, rightly or wrongly, not treated as critical software systems where bugs are unacceptable. Encountering an error at run-time and dumping the visitor to some sort of error page is often considered an acceptable response, and people seem to expect and tolerate this behaviour without quite the same level of loathing they reserve for “Your application has crashed” dialogs or blue screens of death.
• Perhaps most important of all, most web development software is small. More formal systems with static typing and well-specified interfaces probably have a better cost/benefit ratio on larger systems where it is harder for developers to see the big picture and more difficult to co-ordinate people working on different parts of a system without such tools.

I think these are more reflections of the languages in current use and their surrounding cultures, rather than inherent traits of static vs. dynamic typing, but if we’re talking about the state of the industry today, there doesn’t seem to be any practical distinction.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[Anonymous Coward]

>Checked arithmetic (on overflow, they throw an exception)
Eh. This isn't always what you want.

>Support for tail calls (for Lisp, F# and other functional languages)
IBM's compiler does do tail call optimization (for self calling)

>Value types, these are structs that are not wrapped in an object
Again, not that useful. Esp, since hotspot can compile objects down to stack-based if it wants

>Platform-invoke allows developers to call native code without having to write any glue in C++ using JNI, it can all be done in the managed language.
J/Invoke, JNA both do this

>The Common Language Specification: a spec that set the rules for interoperability across programming languages (for example: the rules for public identifier casing, handling of int vs uint and so on).
Do int's in scala work differently than ints in java?

>Delegates allow user to keep a reference to a method or an instance method and invoke it. The VM also can turn any delegate invocation into an asynchronous invocation, so you can turn any method into an async method, like this: mySortFunc.BeginInvoke (array)
java.lang.ref.Method.invoke and java.util.Runnable(and friends)

>Support for dynamic code generation through the Reflection.Emit API.
javax.tools.JavaCompiler

>A database file format allows for efficient reading of the metadata from assemblies. It does not require decompression and the database format is suitable for lazy loading.
Jar files do not have to be zipped

>Attributes were special objects that could annotate most elements in the virtual machine, you could annotate classes, methods, parameters, local variables, and at runtime the VM or the runtime could do interesting things with it.
java.lang.annotation.Annotation

>Unsafe code (pointers) to support C++, Cobol and Fortran compilers running on the CLI.
A bad idea. If you must use pointers, use an opaque interface like sun.misc.Unsafe (stores pointers as a long)

>Native support for talking to COM-based APIs. Although mostly Windows-specific, its used to talk to Mozilla, VirtualBox and OpenOffice APIs in Linux.
Win32 Specific. Apache jakarta has an implementation anyway

>Covariance and contravariance introduced with .NET 4 make even more generic cases a pleasure to use.
Java has covariant return types. Not sure why you'd want non-explicit contravariance or covariant parameters.

>64-bit arrays (although part of the spec, only Mono implements this).
Eh. If it's really a problem, use JNI/JNA or a DB

Stuff that java does that .net doesn't
  - Work well on non Windows OS's.
  - Work on non-x86
  - GPL'ed reference implementation

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[mldi]

That's "Controlled by Oracle", which is far worse than "Controlled by Sun", at least for viability.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[cowdung]

Java is better than .Net in the following ways:

- Good timezone support (.Net is a mess)
- JDBC is a solid database library (unlike Ado.net)
- java.util.concurrent
- simpler, stabler language without a lot of needless features
- checked exceptions (better type checking)
- more libraries (from Sun, from apache, from jboss, spring, etc..)
- more options
- more mature
- platform independent
- defacto language standard
- G1 garbage collector and a bunch of other fancy GC options
- Camel case is not broken in Java
- Javadoc format much more readable that .Nets
- pointer compression in 64bit
- escape analysis and automatic allocation to the stack
- several open source implementations and several commercial versions
- integrates well with several high quality application servers (standardized app servers)

See.. I can play too.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[lgw]

Value types, these are structs that are not wrapped in an object

Is that a strange name for a tuple?

Are Java tuples passed by value (I haven't seen them)? Certianly, "tuple" is an odd name for a struct! Of course, it's far odder that C++0x is adding "tuples", which seem indistinguishable from structs. Is there some buzzword compliance thing here?

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Think again. Its the language.

Unit Tests are there to detect developer errors, not language errors but the more errors the language allows the developer to make, the more Unit Tests you need. GPs conclusion is correct.

Re:Getting screwed in both directions

[shutdown -p now]

Eh. This isn't always what you want.

That's why you get a choice:

int x = int.Max;
int y = unchecked(x + 1); // int.Min
int z = checked(x + 1); // OverflowException

The default is unchecked for C# and checked for VB.

IBM's compiler does do tail call optimization (for self calling)

It's trivial for safe calling. CLR has a special instruction to permit cross-method tail calls (it even handles function pointers), which is crucial for getting languages such as ML or Scheme to work right.

Again, not that useful. Esp, since hotspot can compile objects down to stack-based if it wants

Practice shows that global escape analysis is nowhere near as good as programmer's knowledge about how things should be. Yes, HotSpot can theoretically optimize those things away completely, but in practice it often cannot do even trivial stuff, such as avoiding boxing overhead in many common scenarios.

J/Invoke, JNA both do this

Yeah, and it's a mess due to Java's poor type system. .NET can directly map to anything that can be described in C - it has structs with explicit layout control (this covers custom alignment and unions), unsigned integral types, portable pointer-sized integral types (IntPtr & UIntPtr), raw data pointers, and function pointers. With J/Invoke, you have to jump through various hoops to tell it how to map your data structures.

Do int's in scala work differently than ints in java?

The real question is - do classes work differently? Can you take any Scala class and reuse it in Java?

mySortFunc.BeginInvoke (array)

CLR delegates are actually more like magically created (by the runtime) instances of anonymous inner classes implementing callback interfaces. Their advantage is that they're implemented very efficiently by the runtime (effectively just a function pointer + a captured "this" pointer).

javax.tools.JavaCompiler

That's not the same thing. Reflection.Emit lets one emit bytecode (CIL) into a byte array - optionally with a higher-level helper API - and then have it compiled into a method, and have a delegate to it returned. JavaCompiler would be more akin to CodeDOM, but they are heavyweight solutions. Reflection.Emit is used for stuff where speed is of importance. For example, .NET regex engine can compile regexes to bytecode (which is then JIT-compiled to native code, same as any other bytecode) for greater efficiency.

That said, you can still generate Java classes on the fly in memory as well, so it's a draw here.

java.lang.annotation.Annotation

CLR allows annotations to be placed on more things than Java. For example, on method return type.

There's one other thing in CLR type system - type modifiers, modopt and modreq. Those are somewhat like annotations in that they let types be decorated with other types, with VM ignoring it, and specific compilers interpreting the decorations as they need. Unlike attributes/annotations, though, those things decorate types (and not methods/fields/classes - i.e. not declarations), in any context (including parameter & local declarations, type casts... anything). This is used by C++, for example, to encode "const" and "volatile" - something like "const int* volatile" in C++ would become "int modreq(IsConst)* modreq(IsVolatile)" in IL, where IsConst and IsVolatile are classes declared in System.Compiler.RuntimeServices namespace. Any other language that has const/volatile semantics similar to C/C++ can reuse those, and can parse the existing declarations in assemblies compiled by Visual C++.

The VM furthermore considers two types with different modifiers to be distinct for the purposes of signature ma

Shit.

[AnonymousClown]

I've been hoping for COBOL.NET.

Re:Shit.

[Megane]

...and FORTRAN.NET and RPG.NET. Damn.

Re:Shit.

[Lunix Nutcase]

Have no fear then.

Using them?

[0racle]

Was anyone actually using them? We have Python and Perl scripts running on windows and always preferred ActivePython and ActivePerl.

Re:Using them?

[bbtom]

Yes. I have used IronRuby - it is pretty nice. I don't know much about the Windows platform, and it is really pretty useful to be able to write simple Ruby scripts that can interact with .NET stuff. Scripting languages running on top of the CLR (and JVM) is pretty damn useful for a wide variety of applications and situations.

Re:Using them?

[raddan]

In fact, it was this one feature that made me realy, really like .NET. I know that .NET is anathema around here, but I think most of that ire comes from people who have never tried it. I'm a longtime UNIX developer, and after I took the time to learn .NET, I was pretty much floored. A lot of thought went into the language, the runtime environment, and even the IDE-- and I generally hate IDEs. The fact that I could run C#.NET on Linux (Windows Forms included-- there's even a GTK# interface!) was just icing on the cake. What I used to be able to do in a week takes about a day in C#.

Microsoft constantly does this: make something incredibly cool and then fuck said product over. Despite being the most schizophrenic corporation out there, they still make money hand over fist. Baffling...

C#

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as Microsoft continues to make C# and ASP.NET more capable and effective than anything else out there, I don't care if they throw IronRuby in the same trash bin as RegularRuby.

Re:C#

[MightyYar]

I know, right? Whenever I use C# all of these unicorns and ponies keep popping into existence. It was literally created by the Lord Himself.

Can I come work as an astroturfer now?

Inaccurate headline

[Anonymous Coward]

The headline "Microsoft May Back Off dynamic .NET Languages" would be better?

Harder than you think

[cracauer]

The truth of the matter is that it is very hard to support random other languages on VMs written for certain languages.

All these dynamic languages do one thing or another that puts a hole in your plan. Ruby with it's continuations is right up there but Python with "modify anything fundamental anytime" isn't much better. The native environment has a huge headstart.

We should all move to LLVM.

What Oracle v. Google tells us

[ciaran_o_riordan]

With Oracle attacking Google over Java patents...

One lesson to be drawn, as suggested by Miguel de Icaza,[4] is that people should move to Mono and C# because Microsoft's patent terms are better than Sun's.

On the other hand, one could draw the lesson that it's foolish to use languages / platforms controlled by companies that use patents aggressively.

Another point is that if Google had used IcedTea (the GPL'd version of Java), they never would have been at risk from Sun/Oracle's patents.

Re:What Oracle v. Google tells us

[perlchild]

They wouldn't have been at risk from the copyrights and trademarks, but just how would they have avoided the patents?

Re:Good

[bonch]

Hard to argue with such a well-researched, fact-based conclusion.

Re:IronRuby

[bbtom]

Simple: choice. Lots of people like Python, and lots of people like Ruby. Having choice is a good thing. Plus there are some libraries (not just Rails) that are Ruby only - including things that benefit .NET programmers like domain specific language tools like RSpec, Rake and so on. Some C# users have been known to use Rake on IronRuby as a lightweight alternative to NAnt, for instance.

So he was a _PM_?

[melted]

Then nothing was really lost with his departure. All Microsoft PMs do is sit in the meetings, "manage schedule", "report status", and take credit for devs' work. What's even more insane is that in some teams PM/Dev ratio is 1:1. So that remaining dev (assuming he was, in fact, a dev) has just become twice as productive, due to the decrease in the number of meetings on his calendar.

Multiple Languages With .Net Always a Pipe Dream

[segedunum]

While this is slightly different, creating dynamic language environments on top of .Net, language neutrality in .Net has always been a myth. It's why there is only one language for .Net in C# and how VB.Net has become totally pointless because it's merely a syntactically different but identical .Net language. After attempts at those languages failed, such as those by ActiveState, we then got reasonably API compatible Ruby and Python environments being developed on top of .Net. Unfortunately, people already had API compatible versions of Ruby and Python - the official ones - and as a result no one has seen fit to run anything under a .Net Ruby or Python environment en masse. Environments like JRuby just clouded the landscape still further. All Microsoft really wants to do is try and get a critical mass of developers deploying to their versions of Ruby and Python probably for embrace and extend, and there is no sign that this is happening. They're trying to keep on with PHP because it's still the dominant web scripting language that they need for Azure to look semi-credible, but this is likely to meet a similar fate for the same reasons.

The one environment that Microsoft should have created on top of .Net they simply didn't do. They should have created a rapid application development environment on top of .Net, free of the strict confines of C# and object oriented development, that aimed to be at least API compatible with classical VB so people merely had to recompile - as they had always been able to do. Alas, all that Microsoft did was force developers to throw lots of lines of existing code down the drain if they wanted to upgrade or either stay on the platforms they were on permanently or convert their applications to web based ones, which many did.

Microsoft don't appear to have learned a thing after ten years of .Net.

Ignorance, mostly.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to understand the history of web development to answer that question properly.

The earliest dynamic web sites were implemented mainly in C and C++ by software developers who practiced the craft first and foremost, and treated web development merely as a particular application of their software development skills.

Starting around 1996, however, things started to change. Many non-developers started getting involved with the web. Some of these people had absolutely no programming experience, and thus just couldn't handle C. They ended up using Perl instead, which was basically the only practical scripting language at the time, since it was significantly easier to use than C or C++. PHP soon arose from this group of developers, and followed its own path.

Given the amateurish origins and background of this community, there wasn't much emphasis put on security, reliability, quality, maintainability and proper language features like static typing. That's why web applications from that time period are poorly written, and full of bugs and security holes.

On the other hand, Java soon became widely adopted by business users at roughly the same time, and soon enough they started developing web applications using Java. Many of these developers were former C and C++ developers, rather than Perl developers. After ASP.NET was released, they were soon joined by C# and VB.NET developers. These applications, being written by professional developers, are often significantly better than what was produced by the amateurish PHP/Perl community.

By the mid-2000s, the Perl/PHP community soon welcomed Python and Ruby, since they were more sensible dynamic languages that addressed many of the issues with Perl and PHP. Microsoft, Sun and others tried to draw these developers over to their platform by offering dynamic language support for .NET or the JVM. That's where IronPython, IronRuby, Groovy, JRuby, Jython and other language implementations come into play.

Given the history of web development, dynamic languages became widely used mainly out of ignorance, and have remained widely used due to continuing ignorance. There's no technical argument in favor of dynamic languages. They're just used because their users and proponents often don't even know about how much better and easier static languages make the development of both small and large applications.

Re:Ignorance, mostly.

[Just Some Guy]

Given the history of web development, dynamic languages became widely used mainly out of ignorance, and have remained widely used due to continuing ignorance. There's no technical argument in favor of dynamic languages.

Speaking of ignorance; pot, meet kettle! Dynamic languages became widely used mainly because they're so damn nice to use. I have a lot of background in C, functional languages, and various assembler dialects (which are really the ultimate in dynamic languages!), but I'd rather use Python than any of them for routine development.

What specifically don't you like about dynamicism? Most of the complaints I've heard are that it forces you to write all the checks yourself!, as though the kinds of constraints you'd need in a static language are required (or even desirable) in a dynamic language.

For example, I love duck typing. I can write a class that implements read() and pass it to almost any function that expects to receive a file-type object as an argument. I can write def add(x,y): return x+y and know that it will do the right thing whether I pass in ints, floats, or strings. (Side note: dynamic typing is not the same as weak typing; you can't add 1+"2" because those types are incompatible. I can't stand working in languages that attempt to do what I mean by guessing).

So a static language adherent might complain that my definition of add doesn't check for every possible combination of input datatypes. That's kind of the point, though; in Python you wouldn't want to prevalidate everything. Just run the operation and let it do its thing. If you've passed in, say, a file handle and a PDF, then the "+" operation will fail, but every sane case will actually work as you'd expect.

I guess I can summarize it this way: the only type errors I've ever received while programming in Python have been when I passed None to a function by accident because (for example) a database call returned an empty set. In each of those cases, I'd have gotten the same kind of error if I'd accidentally passed a null pointer to a C function - except that the Python program threw an exception instead of opening a security vulnerability.

I can program in plenty of static languages. Now that I'm far enough along in my career that I can pick my own tools, I almost always choose not to. I love dynamic languages and I won't voluntarily go back.

Re:Ignorance, mostly.

[xMilkmanDanx]

+1 duck typing is awesome.

I'd bet, part of the problem the GP is griping about is really people forcing problems that aren't meant for ruby or python or php into a web application. If you have 1000's or even 100's of models, why do you need a web interface for all of it?

Ruby on rails (and in particular my personal favorite flavor hobo) makes for awesomely quick development for small - medium sized applications. I wouldn't use it for a behemoth application, unless said behemoth is really 100 medium sized problems that got stuck together for no good reason.

Also, I couldn't imagine trying to develop a website in c or c++ with having to worry about memory management and poor string support.

Re:Do Microsoft products use .NET?

[lena_10326]

Are there any Microsoft products of importance that are programmed with .NET?

If you search for a Microsoft job, most are working with C# and C++. I interviewed at Microsoft in the past and there appears to be an extreme preference among their programmers to use C# because the majority of Bing/MSN code is in C#. I think Microsoft lacked the commitment because the prototypical Microsoft developer isn't interested in Ruby or Python. Those languages come with the baggage of social stigma: rogue developer, "non-enterprise", web monkey, low pay, low performance, 1 man startups, and "only for prototypes". It was clear to me developers inside Microsoft prefer C#.

Re:Confusion likely in Programming sphere

[obijuanvaldez]

If there is any confusion, you are adding to it. Microsoft is not going to "give up developing .NET," they are simply trimming the teams that were developing CLR implementations of Ruby and Python for the .NET Framework. This probably means the end of the Microsoft implementations for those languages, but that is all. It is foolish to think that if those languages are no longer supported by Microsoft for the .NET Framework that Microsoft will just give up on .NET Framework entirely.

Re:Multiple Languages With .Net Always a Pipe Drea

[segedunum]

Microsoft killed old-school VB/VBA development and forced a generation of terrible developers to move, however relucantly, towards object oriented programming by accident.

Nope, it definitely wasn't an accident so I wasn't implying that. The purposefully did it. Quite why they did it I cannot fathom because it's just hurt and fragmented their developer base that grew to an extremely critical mass during the nineties. Maybe the MSDN guys got greedy and thought they could make money from getting people to rewrite everything, I don't know.

I know people sniped at VB, but the fact is that probably billions of lines of code are sitting around written in it and it's the only rapid development platform Microsoft and Windows has. Throwing that away was not a smart move.

Not really

[thasmudyan]

Microsoft management knows full well that the only way to stay on top of their huge bloated codebase and architecture is to continue along the path of managed code. The only thing they're not fond of are dynamic languages, pure and simple. Support for dynamic languages was added to the .NET runtime very late in the game, and begrudgingly at that. Their current development and runtime environments rely on huge amounts of auto-generated boilerplate glue without which the simplest tasks wouldn't be possible.

The reasons for this are probably largely historical, because there are still a lot of people from the old COM days working at MS. There are fact-based arguments as well: Dynamic languages tend to be more concise but are more difficult to automatically evaluate and optimize, especially considering the way Microsoft is relying on interface contracts and access policies (all of which are either generated by static language code or in turn serve to generate such code). Besides, none of the teams working on those much-needed tools and design-helpers wants to be put out of a job, so of course they have to stay firmly committed to their huge heap of statically generated code.

A few years ago some Microsoftie told me about a new research OS they were working on, it was completely .NET-based and probably still reflects how MS would like Windows to be if they could start over from scratch today. I believe the project's name was Singularity, I don't know if it still exists. Anyway, the whole point of the OS was its completely static architecture. There was no support for dynamic languages, all executables were statically linked and completely rigid. There was no self-modification allowed for any application and as far as I remember applications couldn't even dynamically load libraries at runtime. So, in a way, they already made clear which road they are going to go down. Dynamic languages aren't in the mix anymore, but managed code will stay around for a long time at Microsoft.

Only on Unix, you say?

[ratboy666]

"too bad all the Java application servers blow on anything but Unix... so in reality... with Java you get Unix OSs"

J2EE application servers are available on Windows Server, Solaris, HP-UX, RedHat Linux (and other Linux distributions), AIX, OS/2, OS/390, OS/400.

Are you telling me that the two Mainframe servers aren't stable? That the Linux (JBoss or WebSphere) isn't stable? And, if a J2EE server (WebSphere or WebLogic) is blowing up on Windows Server, I would really like to know.

Back up your claim, please.