Entries classified under microsoft

I'm catching up on the happenings of PyCon and thought this IronPython keynote summary was interesting:

The news from this morning's keynote is: IronPython released (at last). The running joke in Jim Hugunin's talk was pretending that it had only been two months since he joined Microsoft. In fact, it took about eight months to work out how to do an open source release once he got to Microsoft.

That's not funny - it's a miracle.

The new plan is to release every two weeks until there is a 1.0 release. There are one-and-a-half engineers working on IronPython. Jim is spending half his time evangelizing dynamic languages and Python within Microsoft. The hope is that the next version of CLR will have better support for dynamic languages.

I started ranting here about how quality dynamic language support on the VM is coming down to a battle of who will get lucky and be the less clueless between Microsoft and Sun. The more I think about it though, the less I care. Here's why:

• Small teams are good teams. Nine women can't make a baby in a month and all that... I'd rather have Jim-and-a-half take two years writing a quality Python implementation on the CLR than to have an, uhh, more traditional Microsoft product in six months.

• Maybe Patrick is right. Actually, I'm sure he's right; I just haven't decided if that means there's no value running dynamic languages on the VM. I think we need something to break through on one of the VMs if we're ever going to move this into the enterprise. There's no way I could bring Python into my place of business on any serious level. This really comes down to it not being blessed as Enterprise Class (blech!) by Sun. It seems we need the VM to get in the door and then maybe we can just move quietly toward CPython with a Java/CLR bridge?

News.com.com.com is reporting that Firefox is gaining on IE faster than expected. Amsterdam based OneStat.com has IE's market share as low as 88.9%. I can't help but wonder if those guys didn't hit the hookah a few too many times before running the numbers. The Mozilla Organization has been saying that they hope to have 10% of the market by the end of 2005. You could project that they might reach that by the end of 2004 if these OneNet stats are accurate, which they most probably are not.

Sigh

At any rate, check out this gem from Microsoft's director of product management for Windows, Gary Schare (pronounced Gair-ee Share-ee ;)

"I still believe in the end that most users will decide that IE is the best choice when they take into account all the factors that led them to choose IE in the first place," Schare said. "Meanwhile, we're happy that they're primarily (using Firefox) on Windows, and that Firefox is part of the large ecosystem of software products available on the Windows platform."

The "factors" he references are covered briefly here, while more on the "Windows ecosystem" he mentions can be found here.