www.nickhodge.com

My key­note at Pycon-AU. It is good to be back doing what I do best. Present­ing deep tech­no­lo­gies to tech­nical audiences.

Pop over to http://www.trypython.org/ and Python away.

Using Iron­Py­thon and the Sil­ver­light 2.0 plu­gin, being CloudPy­thonic has never been so easy.

Microsoft’s John Lam and Jim Hugunin go large with the DLR at MIX07. Here are my notes whilst listen­ing and watch­ing the presentation:

What to expect: a Mac, Text­Mate, Javas­cript, Python, Ruby, Safari and Silverlight.  Text­Mate equals text edit­ing. Sil­ver­light is not bin­ary, its just XML and text. You can break it apart and look at the gooey­ness inside. And some friendly Microsoft people ban­ter­ing about Ruby vs Python.

And DLR is going Open Source, like Iron­Py­thon.

What strikes me the most is that the lan­guage that people are com­fort­able with: Javas­cript, Python, Ruby, C# — you can code your cli­ent side in the same lan­guage as server side.

Also, hav­ing Ruby instan­ti­ate Javas­cript and call func­tions. Wow. With a C# object doing UI. Tech­nor­ati via XML through Yahoo!Pipes to JSON to Sil­ver­light on a Mac. Retriev­ing from the JSON object deseri­al­ised and quer­ied via LINQ.

Let alone doing Basic, with REM and all.

In their only Power­point slide, Jim details the per­form­ance gains of Iron­Py­thon on the CLR engine. I won­der if the perf gains are going to match to Ruby, too? Is the DLR/CLR going to be the saviour of the scal­ing bumps of Ruby?

Parts of the DLR (from Jim Hugunin at end of video):

1. Dynamic type sys­tem, shared object system
2. Shared host­ing API; host one, get all of ‘em. ruby bits are com­ing together now.
3. Bunch of help­ers for com­piler writers, so dynamic lan­guage runs fast

Ques­tion: can use DLR inside con­sole, ASP.NET?

Answer: yes, you can use DLR any­where you are using .NET. More con­strained in Sil­ver­light, due to the sandbox.

Ques­tion: is it com­pil­ing an assembly, or execut­ing script

Answer: Dynamic meth­ods in .NET 2.0, for code gen­er­a­tion lazily; and is a dynamic method. Only held whilst there is a live ref­er­ence. ASP.NET scen­arios with stress test not held onto. Not using method rental; System.Reflection.EmitDynamicMethod

Ques­tion: JScript.NET vs. new Dynamic Lan­guage Jscript?

Answer: Developer want lan­guage pur­ity, not tight integ­ra­tion and fol­low­ing .NET. So fol­low the ECMA 3.0 spec. That’s Javas­cript. vs. Ruby “freelove” spe­cific­a­tion of Ruby is its imple­ment­a­tion, not a spe­cific­a­tion document.

Microsoft has changed, big time. My head is spinning.