I find it interesting that Martin published that on the same day that Jamie Cansdale (of TDD.NET fame) divulged all the information about his current, ongoing struggle with the VS team. [1]

As a student, I know a huge number of my fellow students work solely on a FOSS stack. And more than a few of them are avid Ruby enthusiasts. Most of them don't hate Microsoft, but just aren't excited by anything coming out of Redmond. And while I /am/ excited by the new language features (Linq, Expression Trees, Lambdas etc.) that are coming in the next version of the Microsoft stack, I've generally lost a lot of interest in doing things the Microsoft way.

Anyway, my point is that Microsoft isn't just losing the alpha geeks, they're losing future developers (or maybe I know some of the future alpha geeks...), and "hobbyists" like Jamie (although I would contend that Jamie's an alpha geek as well).

[1] weblogs.asp.net/.../microsoft-vs-testdriven-net-express.aspx

Fowler asks: "The big question for Microsoft's "Iron Ruby" is how compatible will it be? Will it be a full implementation on the CLR"

So far, trends suggest the answers to be 1.) "Completely" and "Yes".

IronPython, even when it was early on and still getting its feet up was amazingly compatible.

For example, I was able to use IronPython to run Trac so that I could integrate some .NET code (web services) and not have to deal with Python ... much.

I think there was one thing that Trac did that IronPython didn't support (and it was on their list of TODOs) so I had to code around that and modify Trac a little, but it worked, by gosh!

So, I'm optimistic, if not confident, that IronRuby will follow the same path.

Jeremy:

I dunno. It's possible may become their poster child for the DLR and Silverlight, but I could be wrong.

Man, be careful what you wish for. If I were a big Ruby fan, I'm not sure I'd want full VS.NET support (yet, at least, Orcas may hold more promise in this regard).

W/r/t IronRuby being in CodePlex still, it seems MS is holding it at arms length and hasn't fully absorbed it into the main fold yet. That's probably a Good Thing(TM) as it will allow IronRuby some wiggle room without a lot of Official Process slapped down on it.

War is coming