IronRuby Manager Leaves Microsoft
blog.jimmy.schementi.com
blog.jimmy.schementi.com
"However, a year ago the team shrunk by half and our agility was severely limited. I’m omitting the internal reasons for this, as they are the typical big-company middle-management issues every software developer has."
This is one of the things that can happen to you when you work at Microsoft. You can start thinking that the terrible work problems you face are both "typical big-company...issues" and problems that "every developer" has to face.
First, many of these issues, and especially their particular flavor, are not general to the business. Second, not every developer works for a big company. You have to get out and work elsewhere for a while to see this.
There's a minimsft.blogspot.com, but is there an equivalent for Apple? For Google? If so, are they as well known? Do they draw knowledgeable commenters from within the ranks of the host/target company?
There are many better places to work than Microsoft. The place seemed truly pathological to me.
Every corporation sucks in some way ... and if there isn't a minimsft equivalent for Google/Apple ... that's a point in Microsoft's favor.
In my experience, all medium and large organizations in this industry have a very unique culture that affects everything they do. For better or worse, there's nothing like working at Microsoft. Personally, having the valuable opportunity to see it up close, I would never work there and I'm not surprised to read the accounts of those who have worked there.
Dude, those 2 sentences contradict each other ... you either worked there and know what you're talking about, or not.
How can you possibly arrive at this conclusion? Are you implying Apple and Google censor and/or brainwash their workforce to think they are perfectly happy?
Also, Jason Zander runs the Visual Studio team, which IronRuby, IronPython, and the DLR happen to be a part of, and is a big proponent of these dynamic languages efforts
Sounds like they are collateral damage of senior management turf wars. This can happen at any company.
How do you think the Pink or Copland guys felt at Apple when their project was canned? Or the Google team who worked on Wave or Orkut...?
Have you worked there? I was there last summer and I'm actually not convinced there are many better places to work.
Have you checked out JRuby/ JPython?
Well, besides being a Lockheed Martin trademark, apparently it means research and innovation by a loosely coupled team. Are there great consulting opportunities in research and innovation?
I think I'm seeing a pattern here. The main IronPython project I'm familiar with is Resolver, a spreadsheet targeted at the financial world, and now this guy leaves the IronRuby team to work for a company that consults for hedge funds. What I don't get is, what the heck is so great about .NET for these financial people? Can't they just run their calculations using scripting languages that have been out for the last ten or twenty years? What do they need the CLR/DLR for?
A couple of points based on my experience at least:
- UI components (such as DevExpress ones) for charts and grids, with fairly good performance
- easier interop with Excel/Word (yes, this is important!)
- ability to reuse legacy C++ (I did this personally, porting and wrapping code from Solaris to C# and .Net through managed C++)
- C# itself is a good language, and it's easier to find recruits compared to say Ruby or Python (at least here in France)
Where I've worked at least, almost nobody uses "scripting languages", it's all Java or C# or C++.
I firmly believe that keeping IronRuby and IronPython alive will serve a purpose for people working in these fields!
I saw that many times in the past. Microsoft is something you really want to stay away from.
Well.. what can I say. It sucks to use any M$ tech. I should stick to OSX and Linux and leave my current employer due to strict use of M$ tech.
Sorry to say that man, but your story reads just like that to me.
I want to thank you for your great work, though. And I wish you all the best for your NY future(;
1st: I didn't say IronRuby, but IronPython 2nd: I said in our company
Thanks to the second comment for getting the second fact straight.
Game developers learned the trick, a while back, of writing things like low-level graphics engines in C/C++, and then high-level control/flow/UI/plugin systems/etc. in "slow"-to-run but "fast"-to-develop-in languages. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if there were also plenty of tasks in the finance world which need code, but don't need hand-optimized-down-to-the-individual-instructions performance.
First make it work. Then, make it fast.
It's easier to optimize a correct program than to fix an optimized, but broken, one.
The reason you should care (assuming you're a .net developer) is that the DLR lets you do all sorts of cool things such as the following c# snippet calling python code:
ScriptRuntime py = Python.CreateRuntime();
dynamic random = py.UseFile("random.py");
//Make an array of numbers
var items = Enumerable.Range(1, 7).ToArray();
random.shuffle(items);
Being able to have ruby, c#, python, et al all running in the same runtime with a clear stack you can inspect across the languages is awesome stuff.
Which is not to say that Microsoft embraces it. Even internally their policies are almost downright hostile.
How so?
And that's where people miss the point. Is there any passion towards Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC thing? Because there a lot of passionate Rails enthusiasts around and it runs very well on top of the JVM.