In April, we wrote about IronRuby hitting 1.0 and Microsoft's "3 years with Ruby [paying] off." It's sad, then, to read today that program manager Jimmy Schementi is leaving Microsoft citing a rapidly decreasing interest in dynamic languages (other than JavaScript) at the software giant.
[..] a year ago the team shrunk by half and our agility was severely limited. [..] In short, the team is now very limited to do anything new, which is why the Visual Studio support for IronPython took so long. IronRuby’s IDE support in Visual Studio hasn’t been released yet for the same reasons. [..] many other roadblocks have cropped up that made my job not enjoyable anymore.Overall, I see a serious lack of commitment to IronRuby, and dynamic language[s] on .NET in general. [..] The bad-news is I will no longer be working on IronRuby full-time, but in the near future I’m definitely staying active. Also, Tomas will definitely continue working on IronRuby when he can; we weren’t the last two people left for no reason. :-)
Given that Tomas and I will only be working part-time on IronRuby now, I invite the Ruby and .NET communities to come help us figure out how to continue the IronRuby project, assuming that Microsoft will eventually stop funding it. I’ll start a thread on the IronRuby Mailing List shortly, so keep an eye on that if you’d like to help.
Jimmy Schementi
Schementi left Microsoft at the end of July and is on his way to work at a NYC-based financial technology consulting firm. I'm sure most Rubyists would be quick to join me in congratulating Schementi and the rest of the IronRuby team (including John Lam, who left in 2009) for making significant strides in a company and environment where the obstacles were piled high. We've wondered for years whether Windows is a first class platform for Ruby and now we know that Ruby certainly isn't even a second class language for Microsoft.
Schementi seems keen for people from outside of Microsoft to get involved with IronRuby to keep it alive. These sorts of efforts aren't often successful, because contributors usually bubble up over time to become more important, and he notes that he is now the first non-MS contributor merely by virtue of no longer working for MS. If, though, you're a .Net and Ruby hotshot and have the time and passion to become a hero in the worlds of DLR and "Ruby on Windows", there's a significant opportunity here for the taking.
