InfoWorld posted an article last week in which Paul Krill, InfoWorld Editor at Large and Doug Dineley, Test Center Executive, sat down with Jason McConnell, the Visual Studio product manager responsible for all languages at Microsoft, to talk about “Dynamic Languages”. It’s actually an interesting read.

The thrust of the article is Microsoft’s support of dynamic languages in the Common Runtime Language. (CLR) Officially Microsoft does not support any Dynamic Languages in CLR but they are hosting 2 projects, IronPython and Phalanger, on CodePlex, their site for community development projects. (We covered Phalanger earlier this month) To start things off, Jason set the tone for the article with this quote that would make any politician smile. He gave this answer when asked about Microsoft’s official stance on Dynamic languages.

We always want to enable as many languages as possible for the .Net Framework, especially the ones that our customers are demanding. Dynamic languages like those you mentioned have gained popularity of late, and so officially, there’s no official stance except to say that we’re looking into how we can enable languages like that to be a great programming experience on the .Net

I recommend the article to anyone interested in PHP on Windows. (or anyone with 10 minutes to kill, it’s not a long article) I won’t spoil it by quoting everything here, I’ll let you read the rest of the article, 15 questions in all, and you can take away from it what you will. I will throw out one more quote to pad the length of this article a little more. Most of the article talks about dynamic languages in general, however the very last question mentions PHP specifically.

IW: So you don’t envision a Microsoft version of PHP or Perl or any of these? You’re going to let pretty much the outside developers take care of that?

To which Jason deftly replied.

JM: We haven’t made any firm plans in that direction right now.

He actually gave a longer answer to the question but the rest of it smacked of a marketing talking point. (All fluff, no stuff)

My take-away from the article was this. The real question that needs to be asked is not whether or not Microsoft will support dynamic languages. The real question is how much longer will there be a serious distinction between languages that have a compiler and those that do not require one. I see the lines between the jobs suitable for “system programming languages” and dynamic languages is blurring daily. Classifying languages by their type, in most cases, makes about as much sense as classifying them by the color of their logo.

Want to swing a cluebat in my direction? Click the comment link below and educate me.

=C=