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Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft

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  1. Ruby 2.0 is dropping continuations.  This feature has high geek appeal but is tough to implement well on the CLR.
  2. John "RubyCLR" Lam is joining the firm. Moving from Toronto to Building 42. 
 
Now, if only Scheme would drop call/cc and Guy Steele would join the firm…
Posted Oct 25 2006, 02:08 PM by don-box

Comments

Jon Skeet wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-25-2006 10:53 AM
Don,

Have you looked at Groovy at all, out of interest? As a Java and C# developer, I'd be interested in whether you saw any good reasons for or against a new language (G#?) which was to C# as Groovy is to Java - a dynamic language (like Ruby) with strong closure support and more expressive syntactic sugar which is still familiar to a C# developer.

There are benefits to Groovy from a Java point of view which are already present in C#, but I still think it could be a good thing...

See http://groovy.codehaus.org if you haven't already looked at Groovy... or I've linked to a blog entry above (written when I knew virtually nothing about it) which would give you a flavour fairly quickly.

Jon
Steve Vinoski wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-25-2006 1:46 PM
Don, too bad you didn't join us at JAOO this year. You could have hung out with Guy Steele and perhaps convinced him to see things your way. :-)
Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff wrote Ruby 2.0 Drops Continuations
on 10-25-2006 3:11 PM
I had missed this in Charles Oliver Nutter’s original post: So what happened? Sometime around JavaOne we heard about the Ruby KaiGi in Japan, a Ruby conference or get-together of some sort. If RubyConf is the big conference for us Westerners, this at least provided a mid-year update for English-speaking Rubyists. Matz was there, Koichi was there, and I believe...
Joe Duffy wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-25-2006 7:26 PM
(+1) on Jon.
(+1) on Guy Steele.
Anthony Cowley wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-26-2006 10:00 AM
Could we at least show some solemn respect for continuations here? :)
Personally, I was gearing up for a call/cc renaissance.
Don Box wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-26-2006 10:21 AM
Yes, a moment of silence is in order.

Hopefully the next OS will have first class support and we'll all struggle with how to add call/cc support to python :-)

DB
Max Battcher wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-26-2006 2:08 PM
Jon, maybe you are looking for Nemerle (nemerle.org)? I think it certainly qualifies for "C#-like Groovy".
Judah wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-26-2006 6:10 PM
Cool. I think such an addition to the CLR team will infuse some new ideas into the minds of the statically typed folks there. Good hire.
Jim Long wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-26-2006 11:05 PM
Oh well... Microsoft already ripped off most of Java and Scheme ideas (both are Guy Steele's works), so you don't need him in the house.
Ivan Eryshov wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-27-2006 3:45 AM
Don, why Nemerle guys are not in MS yet? ;)
Actually, Nemerle is the best .NET language I've ever seen.
John Lam wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-27-2006 8:43 AM
Apparently Matz is wavering on the continuations story. Koichi was having a hard time getting them to run inside YARV (his Ruby VM) and it wasn't a high priority. However, Koichi apparently re-affirmed his commitment supporting continuations. So bottom line: continuations as a feature is contingent on YARV supporting them :(
MenTaLguY wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-27-2006 10:33 AM
Don, are you familiar with <a href="http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/pcmkf-cont-from-gen-stack-insp/">Continuations from Generalized Stack Inspection</a> (Pettyjohn, et al.)?

Given that, and the practical existence of things like RIFE for Java, I wouldn't write off the possibility of reasonably efficient continuations for Ruby.NET on the CLR.

It's not as if the performance bar is set particularly high, either, as long as there's no significant penalty in the non-continuation case: calling continuations in today's Ruby is known not to be a fast operation.
Mike Pence wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 10-30-2006 7:17 PM
Chad Fowler notes at http://chadfowler.com/ that rumors of the death of continuations are greatly exaggerated.
Open Source Developer wrote Microsoft: Continually Lowering the Capability Bar
on 11-02-2006 12:26 PM
That's so nice for you.

Your current architecture is inflexible and hostile to dynamic languages - so you'll just make the languages less dyanamic rather than fix your environment.

Lucky you!
Drum wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 11-03-2006 5:17 AM
MenTaLguY:
Well, I guess Microsoft folk sniffs around the academic sites all the time, taking ideas and people freely and giving nothing in return to programming language community, apart from patent protected virtual machine and some more buzzwords twisting functional programming beyond recognition.
Scott wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 11-20-2006 5:10 AM
I was really frustrated by the Agile Toolkit podcast not giving .NET 3.0 the props it deserves:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/agiletoolkit/NFJS_FALL06_Pannel.mp3

JJ Cale wrote re: Two Excellent Things for Ruby at Microsoft
on 12-05-2006 3:12 AM
> both are Guy Steele's works

So what are you going to do about Steele ripping it off from Kernighan, Stroustrap, Wirth and Kay?

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