"However, a year ago the team shrunk by half and our agility was severely limited. I’m omitting the internal reasons for this, as they are the typical big-company middle-management issues every software developer has."
This is one of the things that can happen to you when you work at Microsoft. You can start thinking that the terrible work problems you face are both "typical big-company...issues" and problems that "every developer" has to face.
First, many of these issues, and especially their particular flavor, are not general to the business. Second, not every developer works for a big company. You have to get out and work elsewhere for a while to see this.
There's a minimsft.blogspot.com, but is there an equivalent for Apple? For Google? If so, are they as well known? Do they draw knowledgeable commenters from within the ranks of the host/target company?
There are many better places to work than Microsoft. The place seemed truly pathological to me.
> There's a minimsft.blogspot.com, but is there an equivalent for Apple? For Google? If so, are they as well known? Do they draw knowledgeable commenters from within the ranks of the host/target company?
Every corporation sucks in some way ... and if there isn't a minimsft equivalent for Google/Apple ... that's a point in Microsoft's favor.
In my experience, all medium and large organizations in this industry have a very unique culture that affects everything they do. For better or worse, there's nothing like working at Microsoft. Personally, having the valuable opportunity to see it up close, I would never work there and I'm not surprised to read the accounts of those who have worked there.
> if there isn't a minimsft equivalent for Google/Apple ... that's a point in Microsoft's favor.
How can you possibly arrive at this conclusion? Are you implying Apple and Google censor and/or brainwash their workforce to think they are perfectly happy?
Also, Jason Zander runs the Visual Studio team, which IronRuby, IronPython, and the DLR happen to be a part of, and is a big proponent of these dynamic languages efforts
Sounds like they are collateral damage of senior management turf wars. This can happen at any company.
How do you think the Pink or Copland guys felt at Apple when their project was canned? Or the Google team who worked on Wave or Orkut...?
I am heartbroken to hear this. .Net, the Dynamic Language Runtime, IronPython and IronRuby are incredibly awesome technologies and if instead of embracing the cool aspects, Microsoft will focus only on the boring enterprisey bits in the future I'll have no choice but stop being a .Net developer and switch to something else. Which would be a shame because I really like those technologies.
There's a big opportunity for the taking here for the right person with both .Net and Ruby experience and enough time on their hands. IronRuby might be a minor Ruby implementation but I suspect if it stays alive it could be a bigger deal in the .Net world and there could be a great consultancy business off the back of it, especially in skunkworks-type situations.
I had to look up "skunkworks." I was wondering if it was just work that stinks, like people don't want to do it, but have to for some reason.
Well, besides being a Lockheed Martin trademark, apparently it means research and innovation by a loosely coupled team. Are there great consulting opportunities in research and innovation?
I think I'm seeing a pattern here. The main IronPython project I'm familiar with is Resolver, a spreadsheet targeted at the financial world, and now this guy leaves the IronRuby team to work for a company that consults for hedge funds. What I don't get is, what the heck is so great about .NET for these financial people? Can't they just run their calculations using scripting languages that have been out for the last ten or twenty years? What do they need the CLR/DLR for?
You do understand that when you build a company on something Microsoft is not doing, but that is adjacent to whatever they do, you risk being offered a ridiculous buyout offer, followed by a thorough carpet-nuking if they ever get interested in entering your business.
I saw that many times in the past. Microsoft is something you really want to stay away from.
Interesting that he's going to a financial technology consulting firm whose products include algorithmic trading. It seems like that would be one of the last spaces to be interested in a dynamic scripting language versus pure speed.
It seems like that would be one of the last spaces to be interested in a dynamic scripting language versus pure speed.
Game developers learned the trick, a while back, of writing things like low-level graphics engines in C/C++, and then high-level control/flow/UI/plugin systems/etc. in "slow"-to-run but "fast"-to-develop-in languages. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if there were also plenty of tasks in the finance world which need code, but don't need hand-optimized-down-to-the-individual-instructions performance.
C++ and C# are big deals in the financial industry, but remember that programmer time is a lot more expensive than hardware time, and there could be wins to be had in extremely rapid development.
I had the good fortune to actually spend some time geeking out with Jimmy on campus. Great guy, and he will be missed. If you are in NYC, reach out to him. He's a geek worth knowing.
Another straw for the camel's back. It's not far off breaking now, friends have been tempting me with offers to return to my roots - Ruby/Linux. Fuck Microsoft.
Probably not that big of a deal if they stop supporting IronRuby. What's the point anyhow? Ruby is most popular because of RoR and Microsoft already has an MVC framework that works just fine. There was some very limited effort to port ASP.NET MVC to IronRuby, but it looked dead in the water to me. Plus, I hear straight up Ruby has built-in bindings for Windows, so IronRuby isn't necessary for scripting either.
As the author points out, he's concerned about the future about dynamic languages on the .net platform in general. IronPython and IronRuby are just two implementations of it.
The reason you should care (assuming you're a .net developer) is that the DLR lets you do all sorts of cool things such as the following c# snippet calling python code:
ScriptRuntime py = Python.CreateRuntime();
dynamic random = py.UseFile("random.py");
//Make an array of numbers
var items = Enumerable.Range(1, 7).ToArray();
random.shuffle(items);
I guess when I say "what's the point?" I mean, what's the point of really wasting so much time and effort getting Ruby running on .NET in general? And I say that as primarily an MS developer. It's all just a plot to sell expensive licenses and thus will never have good community backing. Look what this guy went through. He's talented. It's a shame he didn't work for a company like Google who embraces OSS more genuinely.
I think it depends (like most everything at MS) on your team. Although actually what I'm referring is to legal restrictions on software we can actually use in production.
> Microsoft already has an MVC framework that works just fine.
And that's where people miss the point. Is there any passion towards Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC thing? Because there a lot of passionate Rails enthusiasts around and it runs very well on top of the JVM.
"However, a year ago the team shrunk by half and our agility was severely limited. I’m omitting the internal reasons for this, as they are the typical big-company middle-management issues every software developer has."
This is one of the things that can happen to you when you work at Microsoft. You can start thinking that the terrible work problems you face are both "typical big-company...issues" and problems that "every developer" has to face.
First, many of these issues, and especially their particular flavor, are not general to the business. Second, not every developer works for a big company. You have to get out and work elsewhere for a while to see this.
There's a minimsft.blogspot.com, but is there an equivalent for Apple? For Google? If so, are they as well known? Do they draw knowledgeable commenters from within the ranks of the host/target company?
There are many better places to work than Microsoft. The place seemed truly pathological to me.