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Tuesday May 1, 2007 2:56AM
by Curt Hibbs in News

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Its getting downright exciting in the dynamic languages arena!

First, Sun hires the JRuby developers and implements killer Ruby support in Netbeans. Now, Microsoft announces IronRuby and the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)! Microsoft’s new DLR will support Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and Visual Basic. Since the DLR is built on top of the CLR, these dynamic languages will interoperate with the existing statically typed languages like C#.

As a bonus, Microsoft is releasing all of this under a BSD-style license, the Microsoft Permissive License. Hopefully, this is a true BSD-style license without any gotchas, but if anyone knows more about the details of this license, please post a comment. On top of all this, Microsoft’s new cross-browser Silverlight plugin will allow all of this to run client-side in the browser!

Jon Udell has a podcast where he interviews John Lam about the DLR and IronRuby. John is the creator of RubyCLR, who was later hired by Microsoft to create IronRuby