Python and Ruby with .NET

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An amazing session with Mahesh Prakriya and John Lam came on Monday night. Mahesh was covering the IronPython efforts for .NET and John came to talk about Ruby. It was refreshing to see the smaller number of developers practically using .NET but for whom language mattered.

Mahesh gave a history of Python support in the CLR and made a case for dynamic languages within .NET. His examples were pretty cool, especially when he started with a few examples of Python:

2 + 2 (room is quiet)
22**64 (room is quiet - David is amazed at the response in milliseconds)

He also showed a powerful implementation of a Matlab / Mathematica type tool written in Python for .NET.

John's part of the talk was also very good - he has written a bridge between Ruby and the CLR. John was fairly funny and expressive and his demos of Ruby and the CLR were fairly good in giving a picture of what he was tring to do.

John's blog is here, Mahesh doesn't blog but a search on Google shows him in a few places. I'm going to be downloading Iron Python and RubyCLR in the next month or so. Not completely sure, but it seems that here is where one can find RubyCLR.

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