Dynamic vs Static languages… FIGHT! March 16, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : software, development , trackbackVia Obie, Reginald Braithwaite argues that compile-time type checking doesn’t buy you much in today’s world. I agree, especially if you are doing test-driven development.
There is alot of activity getting dynamic languages to work on top of existing VM’s such as the JVM and the CLR. Over at Microsoft, IronPython’s pace of putting out betas is impressive, whilst over at Sun, James Gosling is warning of the dynamic language barbarians at the gates.
Interpreting the language (Ruby, Python, whatever) to native JVM/CLR bytecode is only half the battle however. When the standard libraries for those languages are implemented through the underlying capabilities of java.* or System.* things will really get cooking. In my opinion, whichever of the JVM or CLR can get Ruby (and Rails) to run seamlessly on their platforms first will win a lot of kudos in the enterprise space as they will gain the productivity of Ruby/Rails, plus the integration with alot of ‘native’ Java/.NET code. The JRuby project is already making progress in this direction (albeit without Sun’s help). Scoble asked late last year what MS could do to make ASP.NET development more appealing. Get Ruby & Rails to run on the CLR, that’s how!
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John Lam is doing interesting work bridging between Ruby and the CLR. he’s dropping code regularly and has some nice eye candy demos working:
http://www.iunknown.com/