I guess everyone has already heard the news about some key developers leaving the Dynamic Languages team due to what they perceive as waning support for Dynamic Languages at Microsoft.
I'm quite fond of Python and try to use it often. So, by extension, I care about IronPython and would like to see it continue to evolve. I'm sure many people feel the same for IronRuby. But the thing that I still can't quite figure out is why should .NET developers care about IronRuby and IronPython?
If you were to write a letter to Microsoft asking them to continue supporting and developing the DLR and the Iron languages, what arguments would you use?
If you were to convince your employer to commit developers' time to contributing to the yet-to-be-made community-supported versions of IronPython or IronRuby, how would you rationalize it in terms of business value?
Here are the few interesting use cases that I could come up with, but if I where a manager pondering the question above, I probably wouldn't find them that compelling:
Can anyone think of something better?
What you wrote there is right and I'll add some more bullets:
I wouldn't underestimate the value of embedding one of them in a large application. I've used Ruby's meta-programming capabilities to modify an app's internals on the fly to hook into things it would usually be difficult to access (this is especially true for events; I can easily add a temporary external hook to manually raise an event for testing instead of actually modifying and recompiling the C# source). This has let me hunt down bugs and reproduce tricky scenarios more easily. It has also let me prototype various code that I would later make into a unit test or new classes.
In addition, it can be useful for QA manual testers. Common tasks can be incorporated into automated scripts they can run.
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