IronRuby isn't dead, it's been set free on a farm upstate

Yesterday Jimmy Schementi posted his farewell to Microsoft and with it his thoughts on the future of IronRuby. This made it onto twitter almost immediately as "IronRuby is dead". This was shortly followed by a number of voices countering with, "No it's not, it's OSS, step up community!". I think that's rather missing the point.

Microsoft needs Ruby more than Ruby needs Microsoft

I'll even go as far as saying Ruby has no need for Microsoft. But Microsoft has a clear problem with attracting a community of passionate developers building the next generation of apps. There is a large, deeply entrenched community building enterprise apps that is going to stay loyal for a long time, but just as Office will not stay dominant as a monolithic desktop app, the future of development for Microsoft needs to be web based and there's isn't a whole lot of fresh blood coming in that way.

Fresh blood that is passionate and vocal is flocking to Ruby, Scala, Clojure, node.js, etc.Even the vocal developers on the MS stack are pretty much all playing with Ruby or another dynamic language in some capacity or other. Maybe you think that those people are just a squeaky wheel minority, and maybe you are right. But minority or not, they are people who shape the impressions that the next wave of newcomers sees first. It's the bleeding edge guys that pave the road others will follow.

Startup technology decisions are done via peer networks, not by evaluating vendor marketing messages. Instead of trying to attract and keep alpha geeks, Microsoft is pushing technologies like WebMatrix and Lightswitch, as if drag-n-drop/no-code development wasn't an already reviled stereotype of the MS ecosystem.

Some have said that IronRuby is not in the interest of Microsoft. It would just be a gateway drug that makes it even easier to jump the MS ship. Sorry, but that cat's long out of the bag. Ruby's simplicity and ecosystem make jumping ship already as easy as could be. And right now, once they jump ship, with no integration story, they will quickly loose any desire to hold on to their legacy stack.

IronRuby, while no panacea to these problems, at least offered a way for people considering .NET to not have to choose Ruby or .NET. And it had the potential to expose already devoted Ruby fans to what .NET could offer on top (I know that one is a much harder sell). If you look at the Ruby space, Ruby often benefits from having another language backing it up, which makes Ruby front-end with Scala back-end popular. And if IronRuby were competitive, being able to bridge a Ruby front-end with a C# or F# back-end and have the option to stay in-process is a story worth trying to sell.

Let the community foster IronRuby, that's what OSS is all about!

Ok, that sounds idealistic and lovely, but, um, what community are you talking about? The Ruby community? They're doing fine without IronRuby. The .NET community? Well, OSS on .NET is tiny compared to all other stacks.

Most OSS projects are 99% consumers with 1% actual comitters. And that's fine, those 99% consumers grow the community and with it the pool of one percenters increases as well. But that only works if the project has an appeal to grow the 99% pool. It is virtually impossible to reach the bulk of the .NET pool without a strong push from Microsoft. I'm always amazed how many .NET developers that I meet are completely oblivious to technology not eminating from Redmond. And these are not just people that stumbled into VB because their Excel macros didn't cut it anymore. There are good, smart developers out there that have been well served by Microsoft and have not felt the need to look outside. For a vendor that's a great captive audience, worth a lot of money, so it's been in the interest of Microsoft to keep it that way. But that also means that for a project to get momentum beyond alpha geeks on the MS stack, it's gotta be pushed by Microsoft. It needs to be a first-class citizen on the platform, built into Visual Studio, etc.

The IronRuby catch-22

IronRuby has the potential to draw fresh blood into the existing ecosystem, but won't unless it's already got a large momentum inside of the .NET ecosystem. Nobody is going to use IronRuby instead of Ruby because it's almost as good. You can't get that momemtum without leveraging the captive audience. And you can't leverage that captive audience without real support from within Microsoft. The ball's been in Microsoft's court, but apparently it rolled under a table and has been forgotten.