Both of these two projects attempted to solve a problem that very few people have - using .NET libraries from Python and Ruby. In exchange, you had to give up all of your existing native libraries. That is a trade-off that very few people wanted. Source: I started the IronRuby project.

I learned this lesson the hard way a few times in my career - always have respect for people's existing code investments.

Looks like things are changing in IronPython land:

https://www.infoq.com/news/2016/08/IronPython-Leadership

I can't speak to Ruby, but Microsoft has an active Python group.[1] Granted, it seems to focus on Visual Studio (which I'm told has excellent Python tooling) and Azure.

[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pythonengineering/

Neat, but that doesn't seem to be integrated into .NET like IronPython was (well, is, just not maintained it seems). Which is what the post I was responding to was talking about.

Ah, touché. I'm not a Windows person, so I don't know the boundaries well.

I used to love Python when I came to it years about after slogging along through QBasic, VB6, C++ and C, but in this day and age, it doesn't really offer much to me over doing things in modern C#, especially on the CLR. I appreciate some of the changes that were made to the runtime to support IronPython, like dynamic support and the DLR, but if I'm going to be doing something not-C#, then I'd rather go towards F#.