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IronPython and a New Era

As many people have written about, IronPython 1.0 was recently released. There has been a lot said about it, and most interesting has been the response from many groups with little or no connection to the Python community. The fact that the language runs on .Net is more important than most Pythoners realize yet, and there is a predicted large number of future users of Python coming in from this new area of exploration. Many developers using C# or Visual Basic will be glad to move to a fun language like Python for at least part of their projects, and the integration with the CLR makes it flawless to mix with the rest of the components. It all reminds me of a line from Victor Vernado, the black albino comedian: its all the fun of dating a black man, without the disappointing look from your father. IronPython opens the door for a lot people who were unable to move into the community, due to personal or corporate barriers to leave the safety of the Microsoft Umbrella. IronPython is a bridge between two very strong and thriving camps of software development. It will be interesting to see who and what crosses this bridge and what new connections between these two arenas will rise.

I'm personally interested in IronPython for tapping some new ground in the commercial realm, but I won't speak of it much yet. I am also keen on seeing how well IronPython will work with and be succesful in areas like game development with the new XNA technologies, Mono on non-Windows machines, PyPy related compiling functionality, and Twisted on .Net platforms.

Its surely one hell of a Brave New World.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I've tried to port two apps to IronPython. Both projects crashed, due to the lack of support of various modules, both standard and 3rd party, written in C.
11:50 AM
Michael Foord said…
IronPython is good for new projects, but not much use for porting existing projects. :-)
4:18 PM
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