A while back I went through the personal struggle of trying to decide which .NET dynamic language I was going to adopt. After some fairly lengthy consideration and with a bit of help from Michael Foord, I chose IronPython. Recently I posed this question to Michael: are .NET developers experiencing some *romantic* attraction to IronRuby? Michael I think was a little taken aback and not sure how to respond, most likely I didn’t frame the question eloquently nor clearly enough and so I will take another shot at it here.
Let me explain what I mean by “romantic”. I am noticing that people (I know) in the .NET development community are leaning more towards IronRuby when faced with the choice. Perhaps my perspective over the so-called community isn’t broad enough to make any sweeping generalisations here, I understand that, nonetheless, tucked away here in my small corner of the universe I get a sense that I am observing a kind of default (if not romantic and sometimes perhaps envy driven) choice of IronRuby over IronPython.
What are the contributing factors? Some very high profile .NET people have jumped the .NET ship in favour of developing with MRI in the recent past. The most obvious connection I guess may be that ASP.NET developers (who by far number the majority in the .NET employment pool) have an vested interest in the successes of ROR which may account for this perceived phenomenon. I also get the feeling the feeling that Ruby gets a better deal in the hype stakes and that could also be having some impact.
I wonder has anyone else noted this? Figment of my imagination? Way off the beam? One thing is for sure, neither seem to be playing a real part in the commercial world yet; a search on seek.com.au (a well known job market web site) for IronRuby or IronPython or DLR, will sadly produce no results. This is understandable as IronRuby in only just recently gone RC1, but IronPython has been around a little while and some people in some parts of the world do make a living with it already.
UPDATE:
Oh I did forget that perhaps people just think Ruby is the better of the two languages?
Initially when I made the decision that I would benefit from learning a new language that adhered to a different paradigm (dynamically typed), I selected IronRuby over IronPython simply because I had seen it first and perhaps got caught up a little in the industry hype and good PR going on.
After having spent a less than insignificant amount of time invested in IronRuby I decided to bite the bullet and invest the effort into IronPython instead and the reasons were entirely pragmatic. Microsoft seem to be putting more effort into IronPython, has already found it’s way into other stacks, such as Oslo’s Intellipad (which I plan to leverage) and it’s significantly more mature than IronRuby.
I am constantly finding uses for IronPython in my work and the list of problems that it’s going to help solve is growing quickly. As a side note, if you are looking to use IronPython and are ready to let the experience pass you by because of lack of IDE support then check out using NetBeans (for Python) and instead using IronPython. As previously detailed by Steven and David, you can use the NetBeans Tools menu and make the selection ‘Python Platforms’, then you can configure a new default platform setting and redirect the IDE to use IronPython (see above screenshot). I haven’t used this configuration for long but for now it seems to work nicely.
This post is not about creating a language zealot’s war – let me make that absolutely clear from the outset. What this post is about is a question, how does one go about making their minds up in choosing a language for developing in the dynamic world of the DLR?
For my part so far I have delved into IronRuby and started to employ it for scripting my C# applications. Why did I choose IronRuby over IronPython? It began with curiosity in the Ruby language in general and led inevitably to IronRuby. I quickly acquired a taste for Ruby but there is something nagging in the back of my mind and I can’t get to the bottom of it - “did I choose the right language” and really after all “does it matter which one I choose?”
Given Pythons relationship to C and my emotional connection to the C family of languages, would IronPython have been a better choice? Certainly IronPython is further down the track and more mature than IronRuby at this stage, but what does that count for at this early stage? All these questions make me curious for some other opinions which I would leave to hear right here, so please tell me – what do you think? What criteria would you use to make a choice?
Let me explain what I mean by “romantic”. I am noticing that people (I know) in the .NET development community are leaning more towards IronRuby when faced with the choice. Perhaps my perspective over the so-called community isn’t broad enough to make any sweeping generalisations here, I understand that, nonetheless, tucked away here in my small corner of the universe I get a sense that I am observing a kind of default (if not romantic and sometimes perhaps envy driven) choice of IronRuby over IronPython. 
