At the Mix07 conference, Microsoft announced its plans for a Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) that supports dynamic languages such as Ruby.
Dave Laribee attended one of the sessions on the new DLR technology and blogs:
“Just came from the talk with John Lam and Jim Hugunin. Wild talk. They had, with the DLR in Silverlight, several languages mixed in a single application.”
This sounds like an Amway demo to me. It sounds cool, but it’s not that useful. An app constructed from more rather than fewer languages is not the way to go. Look at the browser and the programming mess it has with its myriad of languages.
The Dynamic Language Runtime solves the problem of providing a platform on which dynamic languages can be implemented. That’s the main point to focus on. If more languages want to share this DLR, that’s fine, but it’s another to think it’s a good idea to mesh up (or is that mess up?) an app with more and more languages.