Pumping Iron in Denmark and on Channel 9

By Michael Foord -
Harry Pierson, IronPython program manager, has now returned in triumph from his world tour. The world tour included a series of talks at Danish universities and the Copenhagen .NET user group.
 At each of these universities, I did two talks. The first was Pumping Iron: The State of Dynamic Languages on the .NET Framework. That’s the one in the Channel 9 video. The other talk was Developing with the DLR, which I’ve posted to my Skydrive. That talk was more focused on the CLR and DLR as a platform for language development. If there’s interest (leave a comment), I’ll record audio for that presentation and post it up on SlideShare or something like that.
If you aren't prepared to take Harry's word that it went well, here is a blog entry from Allan Juhl Petersen who attended one of the presentations:
I had the pleasure of attending Harry Piersons TechTalk at Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (MDCC) on IronPython.
IronPython is a new member of the .NET family, based on the programming language Python. The Iron part has become known as It-Runs-On-.NET.
 A video of the presentation is up on Channel 9:
As is commonly known, Microsoft is developing IronPython and IronRuby, .NET implementations of the popular open-source programming languages Python and Ruby.

While it is clear that Microsoft wants to attract existing Python and Ruby developers to .NET, the role of IronPython and IronRuby for existing .NET developers is less clear. What value is there for a .NET developer in learning IronPython? What are the tradeoffs between IronRuby and a more traditional .NET language like C# or VB? Harry Pierson, new PM for IronPython, will discuss where dynamic . languages fit in the.NET developers toolbox.
Whilst browsing Channel 9 I discovered another DLR related video that I'd not seen before. This is an interview with Kevin Hazzard, who has featured several times on this blog:
In this interview Kevin Hazzard, C# MVP based in Richmond, Virginia, discusses with Zhiming Xue dynamic languages like Python and Ruby, the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) from Microsoft and the next generation of C# that’s becoming a dynamic language.  He explains that the DLR as “the language of languages” defines the boundaries between languages and what’s required for those languages to interoperate with each other and that the DLR as a centerpiece of the .NET Framework 4.0 provides a dynamic dispatch mechanism that elegantly addresses the interoperability problems that we've been working hard to solve since the days of RPC and COM.

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