[bandwagonesque mode on]

Back in the nineties OO Developers were either hard core c++ hackers or a more modest but effecient python programmers (or maybe japanese lone wolf ruby writers). Nowadays, script language practitioners are called script-kiddies and real developers use Java or C#. Ten years ago programming was all about compiling your human readable files into native machine code, today we talk about managed execution. Meanwhile dynamic langauges have always been subject to native interpreters, which during the years have been optimized in every possible dimension to get them performing. But also this niche of software development is moving. 2006 will be known as the year microsoft shipped IronPython and sun brought in the JRuby developers (Does that mean after the movement from sourceforge to codehaus, the project will move again to java.net???) Within a few years C# and java developers will become the old fashioned hackers and the rest of the programming population does OO in a more dynamic way. Want to follow the buzz?, see google’s visualizations here and here (and probably in the future here also) 

[bandwagonesque mode off]

By the way, do not forget to attend the JRuby on Rails Javapolis session this year. And another by the way, and that is why I used the bandwagonesque tags, non-mainstream languages and the concept of managed execution is not something new. Boo  and Groovy are just two codehaus examples but I think Scala and Nice are also worth mentoning. And as a final by the way, this slightly sceptical view on scripting languages just made me realise I started my career ten years ago with the most underappreciated scripting language in existence