I'm at the Microsoft Technology Summit in Redmond this week. This is a conference where we invited developers of all different backgrounds to Redmond to discuss our technologies, what we're doing right and what we're wrong. The audience is primarily Java, PHP and Ruby developers.

 

So far the conversations I've had with people have been absolutely incredible. Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks and No Fluff, Just Stuff, blew me away with information around functional and dynamic languages, half of which I didn't understand.

 

I also was lost in a conversation with Barton Massey from Portland State University. He works on the X-Windows team and does some very interesting work around Game AI and avionics. Wow! Way over my head, but he was very generous in discussing his work with me even though I couldn't add much to the conversation.

 

Right now, we are listening to Jim Hugunin on how IronPython works on the .NET Framework and what it means for implementation and performance of dynamic languages on .NET. Very interesting. Apparently, IronPython has better benchmarks than the unmanaged version. It was interesting that Jim's original goal with the project was to find out what Microsoft screwed up in the .NET Framework that prevented it from supporting dynamic languages. He ended up discovering that dynamic languages were not only possible, but could perform very well.