Dion wrote up comprehensive coverage of the conversation all of us at the Microsoft Technology Summit had with Jim and John. A few particularly interesting quotes came out of that session:

Jim: “Ten years ago if Sun had hired me to work on Jython, I would have been very excited about it.”

John: “I like writing in programming languages that make me happy, not in languages that make me angry.”

Jim: “Rather than debate dynamic versus static, millions of developers are happy doing dynamic languages. Let’s make them happy rather then keep telling them they’re doing the wrong thing.”

Jim: “I write half my code in Python and half my code in C# and I’m extremely happy with that.” You choose the right language for the job and for you.

Unfortunately, for the really interesting questions — when will Rails work on the CLR, will you (please) use the CLR to drive JavaScript in IE at some point in the future, etc. — they simply directed the question back to the audience to get feedback, but… great that we’re having the conversation and that the thoughts are getting planted.

I took a few pictures on my K750i:

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Jim and John introducing themselves

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Jim and John didn’t have an agenda; we put it together as a group.

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John did a prototype Ruby editor with WPF using RubyCLR to drive WPF. He said it got really fun when he employed a bunch of metaprogramming tricks to make generating WPF wrangler in code easier.