Microsoft Matrix

My experience with Ruby is that of porting some code to C#. One thing I learned during porting is ruby code seemed much shorter! The other experience came when I tried ruby gems like project management called "Nu" and was immediately sold. This is how easy things should be in .net as well.

When I read about the Jimmy Schementi and the news of lack of commitment to IronRuby, it was again an feeling of abandonment by Microsoft. Microsoft is mostly interested in getting new people to .net world rather developing the ones already on it to higher levels. This article, though related to Microsoft.Data, has what I want to describe. Read the paragraph Thought 3: Shakespeare had it right.

Every Shakespeare play operates on three levels. The first level is embodied in a jester, who entertains the onlookers (mostly children) who are ill-equipped to understand what's going on in the plot. The second level is the plot, which entertains the onlookers who are capable of longer spurts of self-guided attention. And the third level is metaphorical, which entertains the onlookers who are capable of extracting a bottomless stream of interesting, non-explicit symbolic themes from the play's unraveling. Now, here's the kicker of it all: each level entices the onlooker to "upgrade" to the next level.

Microsoft is interested in level one. And it wants its developers to be at level one. While researching for this article found this post by Ayende

John Lam, the guy writing IronRuby, cannot look at the Ruby source code. That is the way Microsoft works. This is setting yourself up for failure, hard.

The post is more than 2 years old and it seems some things never change in Redmond (like Steve Ballmer). On the whole, it seems community wants it to be part of CodePlex Foundation.  JB Evain has some of his thoughts on IronRuby. But the sad reality is, as one of comments say,

If Microsoft doesn’t want the Iron* to have a success for .NET it just won’t happen.

I am curious as to what will be Microsoft's response. Perhaps it is time to leave Microsoft's matrix. Perhaps Google's App Engine is calling. If only they had C# and Visual Studio Integration!