I'm dying because I've just had a long talk with two of Microsoft's heavy hitters on the Dynamic Languages Runtime (DLR) team and have much to discuss, yet I am in a frenzy preparing for a business trip and cannot yet take the time to do the discussion any kind of justice.

The single-most important quote, I think, was the statement that "no one will take [our implementations] seriously until we can run-- / We aren't done until we can run--" [Django | Rails]. That was contrasted with important libraries that were heavily dependent themselves upon C-based libraries (Zope, in particular). It was also contrasted with libraries that rely on unusual language quirks or implementation details; the touchpoint on that was Ruby's ... shoot, I thought Lam said "objectspaces" but I don't see that in the standard library ... maybe he said "ObjectSpaces-like ability to traverse the entire in-memory object graph" (Anyone know what lib that would be?) ... Anyway, the point was that this was an example of something that would be very difficult to implement within the constraints of the CLR.

I'll update this entry when I can report in more detail...