From: "Pete McBreen, McBreen.Consulting" <petemcbreen@...>
Date: 2000-12-22T12:40:02+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:7935] Re: Ruby on .NET? A Perl Experience

Ben Tilly wrote in message ...

>Personally I think that Ruby is a young language with enough
>areas of possible growth that it doesn't need to jump aboard
>the .NET bandwagon.  Indeed the .NET bandwagon is very
>slight at this point, as far as I can tell it mainly consists
>of companies being funded by Microsoft.  (Activestate, which
>is porting both Perl and Python, is funded by Microsoft.)


I'm really puzzled by the idea of porting Ruby to run on .NET

For me the real value of Ruby is that it is a scripting languge, whereas
.NET seems to be about providing a virtual machine for compiled
languages to run on.

So maybe, if we have to talk about .NET at all, the conversation should
more be about porting the Ruby interpreter to run on .NET

Then Ruby will work on any platform that Micro$oft manages to make the
.NET virtual machine work on. There would still be seperate ports needed
for all the Unix variants, BeOS etc., but at least it would cut down on
some of the porting work.

With the Ruby interpreter working on .NET we might also be able to use
Ruby to script .NET applications, but that might be a hard sell because
of the prevalence of VBA, or maybe VBA would make it a really easy
sell;-)

Pete
----
Pete McBreen, McBreen.Consulting , Cochrane, AB
email: petemcbreen@acm.org    http://www.mcbreen.ab.ca/
Software development is meant to be fun,
     if it isn't the process is wrong