Microsoft's Dynamic Languages Runtime (DLR)

[Paul Boddie]

Fuzzyman wrote:
> On May 4, 11:28 pm, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> > Despite the permissive licences - it'd be hard to slap a
> > bad EULA on IronPython now - the whole thing demonstrates Microsoft's
> > disdain for open standards as usual,
>
> How do you work that out? It seems like a very positive move from
> them.

Well, I don't think the W3C have been *particularly* effective in
defining updated but still relevant standards and bringing them to my
particular part of the big developer table of late, but I think the
different open standards (XHTML, CSS, SVG and so on) have some mileage
in them yet. I'd rather see moderately slow improvement to those
standards than have some break-out group of vested interests (eg.
WHATWG, Microsoft, Adobe) define some pseudo-standard that is even
more tightly bound to their pet implementations than some of the stuff
that gets a W3C blessing (which is how some people could perceive the
W3C standards process).

A permissive licence on the DLR technologies may be positive, but a
cursory inspection of Microsoft's site doesn't reveal much in a
similar vein for the Silverlight technologies. At least technologies
like XUL (which is itself "standards-polluting" if used to deliver Web
applications to the wider public) are the product of an open
development process and have first-class open source implementations.
Still, I'm a cynic about a lot of add-ons to the Web, and I think Sean
McGrath makes a valid point:

http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2007_04_29_seanmcgrath_archive.html#9180786898079500068

Usability isn't always about duplicating the desktop paradigm in a
browser window or encouraging the proliferation of "cool" but closed
technologies which may reveal the glory of an application's "rich"
user experience to those with the latest Microsoft updates, but which
excludes other users for no good reason.

> As for SilverLight, there will probably be a fully open implementation
> by the end of the year.

We'll see. It may depend on how well the Mono people can play catch-up
with Microsoft, but given the sprinkling of potentially optional but
undoubtedly patented technologies (WMA, MP3, and various others, I
imagine), I doubt that "fully open" will ever really apply to any
implementation.

Paul