Microsoft warms to Ruby language with hire

Microsoft has hired John Lam, the software developer behind RubyCLR, open-source software for writing .Net applications with the Ruby programming language.

In his blog, Lam said that he will be joining Microsoft in January of next year and work on the common language runtime and dynamic languages.

The common language runtime, or CLR, is a virtual machine which can run applications written in several different programming languages, including Basic, C# and others.

There is limited support for dynamic, or scripting, languages in the CLR. Microsoft hired a Python guru Jim Hugunin and earlier this year released a beta of IronPython 1.0, a way to write .Net applications with Python.

Lam said that he intends to keep working in the Ruby community and focus on creating better development tools.

"I see my mission at Microsoft as helping to make developers happier; to give them tools that make programming fun," he wrote in his blog.

The Ruby language has seen an uptick in interest in the past year, in part because of the popularity of the Ruby on Rails Web development framework.