FOREWORD
xviii
After getting over my initial skepticism, I’ve grown to love the CLR and .NET as
much as Python. While no platform is perfect, this is the closest we’ve ever come to a
universal runtime that can cleanly support a variety of different programming lan-
guages. Even more exciting to me is that the team is committed to the multi-language
story and we’ve got great projects like the
DLR, IronRuby, and F# to keep extending
the range of languages that can coexist on this platform. I’ve even grown to like C# as
the most enjoyable and versatile statically typed programming language I’ve used.
As the architect for IronPython, I like to believe that it’s such a simple and elegant
combination of the Python language and the .
NET platform that it needs no docu-
mentation. After all, who could possibly not know that they should use
clr.Reference
to pass an out parameter to a .NET method? I guess that it’s assumptions like that one
that would make me a poor choice for writing a book teaching people about Iron-
Python. The best choice for writing a book like this would be a long-term user who’s
deeply engaged with the community and who has been trying to understand and
explain the system to others for years. Now, if only we could find such a person…
I first met Michael Foord in July of 2006. I was preparing an IronPython talk for
the
OSCON conference in Portland, Oregon. This was going to be an exciting talk
where I’d announce that the final release of IronPython 1.0 was weeks away. This was a
terrible time to be preparing a talk since my mind and time were occupied with all the
details of the actual release. To further complicate things, this was the Open Source
Convention, and I knew that I needed to show IronPython running on Linux in order
to have credibility with this audience. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to set up a
Linux box and get some useful demos running. Oddly enough, my coworkers (at
Microsoft) didn’t have any spare Linux boxes running in their offices that I could bor-
row for a few screen shots.
I did a desperate internet search for “IronPython Linux” and one of the places that
led me to was a blog called voidspace. There I found a tutorial on how to use Windows
Forms with IronPython. The reason this tutorial showed up was that it included screen
caps of the samples running under both Windows and Linux. This was just what I was
looking for! By stealing these pictures for my talk I could show people IronPython
running on Linux and also point them to an excellent online tutorial to help them
learn more about using IronPython than I could cover in a 45-minute talk.
I had a few hesitations about including this reference in my talk. I didn’t know any-
thing about the author except that his screen name was Fuzzyman and that he had a
personal blog that was subtitled, “the strange and deluded ramblings of a rather odd
person.” However, I really liked the simple tutorial and I was incredibly happy to have
some nice Linux samples to show the
OSCON crowd. I was most grateful at the time to
this person that I’d never met for helping me out of this jam.
Fuzzyman turned out to be Michael Foord and one of the authors of the book you
have in your hands now. Since that first online tutorial, Michael has been helping peo-
ple to use IronPython through more online samples, presentations at conferences,
and through active contributions to the IronPython users mailing list. I couldn’t think
Licensed to Deborah Christiansen <pedbro@gmail.com>
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