Wednesday, November 7, 2007

The Future and Viability of IronRuby

I'm trying to decide if IronRuby will be important.  More specifically, will it ever be important to my career?

Will IronRuby allow me to sneak Ruby into my day job?

For various reasons that I won't go into, I've given up on trying to work for a company in Grand Rapids that uses Ruby on Rails, at least in the short term.  So I'm firmly seated in .NET Land for the foreseeable future.

Don't get me wrong, C# is a pretty nice language, and is getting more interesting all the time (see the stuff coming out with 3.5).  But, given what I know of Ruby (which, honestly, is not much, but I'm planning to change that), my gut feeling is that Ruby is still a more advanced language than C#.

So just what the hell is Microsoft planning to do with IronRuby?  Will it be "first-class"?  By that I mean: will IronRuby ever ship with Visual Studio?  Will it ever approach the popularity of C# or VB?

What would it take for me to be able to use IronRuby in my day job?  I'm still trying to get a feel for how progressive my employer is, so I really have no idea how likely they'd be to adopt a "new" language.

<TANGENT> I've already gone down this thought-path with some other things, like Test-Driven Development. What would it take to get TDD accepted at my employer?  Or, more to the point, is there any real chance of TDD ever being adopted at my employer?  If TDD is (almost) universally accepted as being a Good Thing, why aren't we doing it?  Scott Hanselman does itPhil Haack does itJeremy Miller does it.  (All .NET guys, BTW)  Why am I not doing it? </TANGENT>

As a pragmatist, I have a really hard time getting excited about things that aren't clearly useful and applicable to my everyday life.  With so many other cool things out there fighting for my limited attention, should IronRuby make the grade?  Is it likely that in the near future, I'll be able to write an MVC web app with IronRuby for a client at my day job?

If any of my readers out there (all three of you), have any thoughts on the viability or future of IronRuby, please chime in.

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