[IronPython] If not IronPython, what?

[Catherine Devlin]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Max Yaffe <maxyaffe at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been reading the buzz around Microsoft's reduced commitment to Iron*
> languages and wondering if I should rethink my own commitment to
> IronPython.
>

I think you're panicking prematurely.  It sounds like the IronRuby team is
down to one person, and the IronPython team is likely to indirectly suffer
(though I haven't heard anything about decreasing headcount there.)  Even if
that's a permanent reduction in Microsoft's commitment and not a quirk of
office politics or recession economics, that's a long, long way from
"IronPython is dead".

Consider: CPython has never had a single funded Microsoft employee working
on it, and yet somehow it gets by.  :)  Even Guido is only working half his
Google hours on CPython, you know, and there have been periods when not a
single human being, anywhere, was being paid by their employer to develop
CPython - and yet it has snowballed forward to the present day.  Jython had
a single Sun-funded employee working on it for roughly 2008-2009, I think -
that's all it's ever had.  It's nice if companies will hire full-time
employees to work on Python implementations, but it's also an unusual
luxury, and not at all the normal course of things, much less a
prerequisite.

And anyway, the IronPython team is still there.  This probably does mean we
can give up hope of seeing Python in the main Visual Studio distribution,
which is a big fat "drat!" as far as Python evangelism goes.  But I presume
you already have a toolset that satisfies you, so it's not an issue for your
team.

Anyway, best of luck!
-- 
- Catherine
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/ironpython-users/attachments/20100818/d483a1a5/attachment.html>