In this article Mohammad Azam express his thoughts on Microsoft cutting funding for the IronRuby project.

Couple of days ago Jimmy Schementi made the announcement of leaving Microsoft. Jimmy is considered the main piller of the IronRuby team and the man behind the Iron mask. With Jimmy leaving the team and Microsoft cutting the life supply, the IronRuby framework is in danger of falling into a comma. If you read my articles published on www.highoncoding.com then you should know that I always advocated the idea of the IronRuby framework.

The IronRuby decline was due to the lack of interest of the dynamic language among .NET developers. Instead of learning and embracing the new framework we saw it as a threat to the statically typed languages. I experienced this personally when I presented an introductory session on IronRuby at the Houston TechFest 2009. Only a handful of people showed up and only few of them seemed interested in learning more about IronRuby.

I also believe that people are genuially more interested in the frameworks that they can use instantly in their applications. This includes ASP.NET MVC Framework, jQuery etc. Unfortunately, most of the developers could not find a place for IronRuby in their applications.

Will IronRuby become the next Iberian Lynx or will it get 9 lives? We must take steps to make IronRuby an open source project and continue the developement of the framework.