Ruby.NET, We Hardly Knew Ye

It comes as not entirely surprising that the Wayne Kelly of the Ruby.NET project from down under has finally given up the ship. Microsoft had already grabbed the spotlight with IronRuby and the DLR. Despite some early gains, it seemed that development momentum had peaked, until Ruby.NET finally made its way up onto Google Code and a "real" open source project.

How, how will John Lam and team proceed without Ruby.NET around? I seem to recall a conversation I had with John when we were at RailsConf, and he was telling me since his M$ cannot look at open-source source code due to patent issues, they were unable to look at the MRI code in order to implement IronRuby. He said they WERE able to look at the Ruby.NET code due to some weird licensing thing. Does this mean they have now had their way with Ruby.NET, and they are done with it?

The DLR is a very cool concept, but it seems like is a lot more than many developers want, particularly polyglot ALT.NET folks who just want to add some capabilities most easily implemented in the Ruby-language, more than they want to switch over to pure Ruby.

Reading further in the mailing list thread, it seems like others in the Ruby.NET project are not quite ready to throw in the towel quite yet... but is it already too late for them?

RubyConf 2007 - Day 2 - "The Ruby VM Smackdown Begins"

As the sun rose over the hills of North Carolina, the quiet betrayed a seething fire blazing in the hearts of three development teams. "Three teams enter, one team leaves!" Yes, I am talking about the main event, people, the one, the only, Ruby VM Smackdown! The room was jam packed, the anticipation was high.

As good fortune would have it, I was sitting right next to the head of the team who was my personal favorite to win the day. Yes, I am referring to Evan Phoenix, leader of Team Rubinius along with co-conspirator Ryan Davis. You should have seen the look at their faces when the JRuby team showed the Rubinius RSpec test suite as part of their demo! But I am getting ahead of myself...

I like the underdog in a fight, when the underdog is tough, and under-estimated by their opponents. On one side, the resources of Microsoft, on the other, the full power of Sun. And then, THE LADS. If you don't want to see that one go down, you have no passion for the cutting edge of innovation. And if you do not know about the history of innovation in the software industry, you might miscalculate the odds. Gentlemen, to your corners... I want a clean fight!

MC Chad Fowler got up, and gave a brief intro to the show. "We are about to see what Matz called 'wonderous' last night," he said. And it was true.

First up, was John Lam of Microsoft with IronRuby armed with "State of IronRuby".

Next, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo of Sun with JRuby using "Ruby for the JVM" style.

Last, the challenger, Evan Phoenix with Rubinius wielding "Rubinius 1.0".

Wow. Bread and circuses, indeed!

I will be posting individually about each of the Ruby VM contestants, and will update the above links when I am done...

After all that excitement, the crowd was starved. We shuffled out to eat our lunches, and converse on all we had seen. From everyone I spoke with, the mood in the crowd was firmly in the Rubinius corner, with a close second to JRuby, with third place probably going to YARV. Hardly anyone I spoke with at RubyConf had any interest in using IronRuby at all!

That is to be expected from a conference like RubyConf, well known for its strong ABM (Anything But Microsoft) attitude, which is pretty unfair. That said, I think the uptake in the .NET community will be the measure of the success of IronRuby, not whether they can get the typical RubyConf attendee to switch back to Windows.

In the afternoon, I got to see some great sessions, from:

"Refactotum: Ruby" - Stuart Halloway
"Maximizing Productivity" - Eric Hodel
"Mac OS X Loves Ruby" - Laurent Sansonetti

I will be posting individually for each session when I get a chance, and will update the links here.

Once the afternoon's sessions had wrapped up, a large group of us overran a local BBQ joint named Mac's, with tasty BBQ, a great beer selection, and a bunch of Harleys in the parking lot. Despite our somewhat atypical appearance (nerd chic) for NC, we were welcomed warmly by the locals. There must've been 30+ people from RubyConf there, it was great!

We then returned at the perfect moment to hear Matz's keynote speech. And it was good. Really good. Matz is charming, and quite funny. His wit was so much better able to emerge in a forum where he was simply presenting, rather than the somewhat less successful "town hall" format that had been attempted the evening before. I have a separate posting with his remarks which will be up later:

RubyConf 2007 - Keynote by Matz

Once the keynote had ended, I just had to go up and shake the man's hand. I know it may be corny, but I really did suddenly appreciate what he really does, which is to inspire the community. People keep looking to Matz for all the answers, but the answers are up to us, my friends. No superheros, remember?

Afterwards, I want to the legendary RejectConf, held right next door. Don't ask me how I wedged my way in, but I did it. To everyone who's toes I stepped on: sorry! There was a fun series of lightning talk (5-10 min) presentations of pretty much brand-new stuff. The beauty of RejectConf is its appeal to the ADD'd-out techno-junkie: every few minutes something else. I will be posting a rundown of RejectConf when I get a chance here:

RubyConf 2007 - RejectConf

RejectConf was really a great highlight of RubyConf. Once they kicked us out, the entire crowd immediately migrated directly next door to the hotel bar where we drank beers and chatted loudly about techno-babble to our great enjoyment. I staggered up to my room, to rest up and prepare myself for Day 3.

Weighing In On The Upcoming Ruby VM Smackdown

Earlier today, I read with great interest the potentially inflammatory post where Ola Bini proclaims the Ruby VM wars already over, and basically divides the Ruby VM empire into two halves, with the center controlled by Rome, err, I mean Rubinius primitives.

I had already come to this conclusion a while ago. Not because I am smarter than anyone, FAR from it. Probably because I am more superficial, and easily impressed by meaningless characteristics, like how cool is the name Rubinius?

Seriously, back to something more erudite, like Ola's post. Notably missing from this future of Ruby utopia is any IronRuby/Ruby.NET vision. Is this a simple oversight, due to the pro-Sun anti-MS bias that any Java programmer has to have, or more likely knowing the source, is it because of the sadly glacial progress of Lam and his new friends, as compared to both Rubinius and especially JRuby?

Man, it must SUCK to work at Microsoft sometimes!

RubyConf 2007 => Ruby VM Smackdown

I just registered for RubyConf 2007, which will be held Nov. 2-4 in Charlotte, NC. If you want a more intimate, more hard-core Rubyist experience, than what RailsConf is turning into, RubyConf looks to be it.

There not being that many tickets available, you better register right now if you want to go. I registered without even looking at the agenda first... just filled out the registration form, and hoped it's was not too late.

Once I has nervously typed my credit card info, and gotten my email confirmation, I took a few breaths. and got around to checking out the schedule for the conference I had just committed to attending. I was not disappointed.

Lo and behold, the ultimate battle of the Ruby VM's will be taking place on Saturday, Nov. 3. Take a peek at what's in store:

9:00A - John Lam - State of IronRuby
10:00A - Charlie Nutter - JRuby: Ruby for the JVM
11:00A - Evan Phoenix - Rubinius 1.0

Wow! If you care at all about the future of Ruby as a language, not just as a vehicle for fevered dreams of Ruby on Rails-based world-domination, you can't help but get excited. The three ascendants to the throne of dynamic language glory, all duking it out in a back-to-back 3-hour frenzy. Yum!

Improving the language performance of Ruby is the big thing needed to push out all those other wanna-be next big languages into the dustbin of interesting languages that no one uses. I think Erlang is really neat, don't get me wrong, but one look at that syntax, and sugar is not what comes to mind!

IronRuby Lives!

John Lam and company have finally gotten something together to release to the world at large for their IronRuby project. I have not had a chance to play with it yet, but as a hard-core Rubyist I will, of course, have to do so.

A few interesting observations from how they have chosen to go about developing this project. One is that they are distributing the source code, albeit as part of the Microsoft Permissive License. I don't really know much about this MS-license, I will have to go find out how permissive it really is.

Another interesting point, is that the IronRuby project will be managed through RubyForge, instead of CodePlex or another of the .NET open source communities. They really want to make an effort to reach out to the Ruby community, it would seem, by being in the old familiar places.

I look forward to playing with it...

Ruby Is More Of A Free Love Kind Of Language

I have been really, really busy lately, which is why I have not had a chance to post anything. I finally caught up on some reading and listening, and John Lam, father of the IronRuby project at Microsoft, has a fun interview on the DotNetRocks podcast. Irrespective of how I may currently feel about the direction over at Microsoft or rock, it is an interesting interview.

My favorite line has to be where John is describing the cultural differences between the users of Python vs. Ruby programming languages. "Ruby is more of a free love kind of language," he says.

I guess when they say that they have drunk the Ruby kool-aid over at Microsoft, they really mean it. But will they wake up hungover and pregnant with a baby they will name "Moonbeam"?