[Edu-sig] IronLanguages in CS?

[kirby urner]

Now that IronPython is out of the MSFT stable, at github, with an
Apache 2 license,
I'm wondering if any CS classrooms are planning on using it.

There's no chance of the plug getting pulled at this point, and Miguel
de Icaza,
one of new new project leads, has a strong reputation for performance.**

My first question was whether Mono now supports the DLR, a set of features
the Iron Languages (Ruby, Scheme and Python) helped to inspire in the
first place.
This O'Reilly blog posting suggests that it does, though I'm wading through lots
of apparent politics I don't understand, regarding the authenticity of the patch
work:

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/05/monodlr_hello_dynamic_language.html

A FOSS stack with Mono should give many coders a running start should they
get snapped up by a Microsoft shop, but without indebting the
university to Redmond
overly much.  Some CS departments pride themselves on being Debian-like
"clean rooms" when it comes to not concealing or walling off internals.  Others
just don't have the funds to provide enough workstations with Visual Studio
licenses.

I've been seeing mixed reviews on whether unleashing these IronLanguages
is going to add or detract from their popularity.  They're esoteric to say the
least, more like academic research projects than commercial endeavors, up
until recently anyway.

In theory, it oughta be possible to write some dynamite curriculum showing
Scheme doing something trail recursive (its best circus trick) inside of
Assembly S, with Python (or Ruby) then invoking it seamlessly.  Best of
both worlds (functional and imperative).  But perhaps we're not really
there yet.

Anyway, thoughts welcome.

Kirby

** blogs sometimes compare IronPython to Visual FoxPro, or at least
mention them together, as the latter is in the throes of having its plug
pulled -- a slow, painful process, with 100K VFP developers looking
for a way ahead (just stick with VFP?).  I've been testing Ethan Furman's
dbf library, available through Python.org "cheese shop" (not called
that).  Has a familiar API with table.next(), table.previous(), table.bof(),
table.eof().  Other ways to mine DBF/CDX/FPT format in the works.