The managed run time for dynamic languages looks cool. I’ve been reading on Ruby lately and the simplicity can take you a long way. However, this could be a curse too. I remember I was in TechEd Europe a few years back, and went to a talk regarding Lotus Notes and Exchange integration. Yes, it was very exciting for the 5 people there…

Anyway, the lecturer said something I can’t forget until today (and in the last few months, I did some Notes programming, and I can attest to his words). He said that the biggest advantage of Notes is also its enemy. It is very easy to build stuff which works immediately. But since it’s so easy, no one maintains the code, you wind up with similar implementations, and it goes down hill from there.

For me simplicity is key for maintenance. I’ve architected and built very ingenious stuff, but it was so generic and open, it then had to be modified and debugged to fit specific implementations, and the results were not pretty.

I shudder when I think about multiple scripting languages making up an application that’s easy to build. Sure – you can do it, but should you?

So assuming the DLR and the tools make it easy to build great working applications, does that mean they will be also maintainable? We’ll see.