"Russel Winder" <rus...@russel.org.uk> wrote in message news:mailman.869.1321025163.24802.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... >On Fri, 2011-11-11 at 15:27 +0100, Marco Leise wrote: >[...] >> Just as a historical anecdote: The Delphi inventor (Anders Hejlsberg) >> switched to Microsoft and was a co-inventor of .NET. Besides Delphi.NET >> there are Eiffel, Mercury, IronPython, Nemerle, Oberon ... you name it. >> Maybe I didn't understand what you mean by shedding, though :) > >For example IronPython and IronRuby were projects funded by Microsoft >and languages officially blessed by them for use on .NET. Microsoft >have now terminated funding, and said to anyone using IronPython or >IronRuby "ok folks you are now on your own, go away".
I think it's a good idea, anytime you have official blessing/funding from big business (even if it's an internal project), or heck, anytime you have *any* heavy reliance on some company big or small, to assume the possibility that status could go away at any minute. I don't mean this as a jab at either big business or any sanctioned projects like IronPython/Ruby, it just seems to be the nature of things: Sometimes a company will loose interest in something, or even flip 180, at the drop of a hat. It's not just MS. Apple caught flack for doing that with Darwin (from what I've heard, anyway). Paint Shop Pro was (accidentially or deliberately, I don't know) driven into the ground when Corel bought JASC. I'm sure there's lots of other such stories with other companies. For good reasons or not, it just happens sometimes. It's great to be able to take advantage of some outside help when it's available. But it's best to be prepared (to whatever extent possible) for it to dissapear without warning, just in case. FWIW, a corrilarly to that (that I picked up from Joel on Software, IIRC, and tend to agree with) is: Don't rely on externals for anything mission-critical.
