#so they made java worse for 'parity'

[dr-jigglebones]

@ Minecraft Bedrock players,

yeah uh same question sorry

@ Minecraft Java players,

How do you do it?

[csharp-official]

Python as the language has many implementations, the "reference" one being CPython, but Cython, Stackless Python and Jython (Python running on JVM) all exist, so it's not really out of place for IronPython to exist too.

As for why: the natural intended usage of IronPython seems to be as an embedded scripting language in a .NET application.

Also I'd say the secondary purpose, as far as Microsoft is concerned, of IronPython (which while it was not designed for it originally as it was made in 2006) is to demonstrate that the newly made Dynamic Language Runtime (2010), which is an extension on top of which all .NET applications are running, Common Language Runtime, is capable of handling running dynamically typed languages in non-toy environments - by retrofitting IronPython to make use of DLR, and possibly encouraging more languages to be made targeting CLR.

(DLR is also used in other ways: the type "dynamic" in C# directly relies on DLR, and DLR also helps when doing COM interop)

I'm not sure if Microsoft seriously hoped for people to make more language interpreters/compilers targeting .NET, or if this was an attempt of demonstrating that in this aspect too, .NET is not worse than Java, but a major problem which overshadowed most benefits the .NET ecosystem had, was it was that it was officially supported only on Windows (with Mono being a community side project that had to keep catching up), which didn't raise much interest, which made Microsoft lose interest too, which in turn made potential users lose interest too.

Microsoft only started rectifying that mistake in 2016 (with .NET Core, which is now, since version 5, named as just ".NET" as it achieved similar feature parity to both Mono and original .NET Framework) as it saw a decent use case for .NET running on Linux machines that could (and did) bring them a lot of money: cloud computing.

Am I the only programming language gimmick blog? I haven't seen any others and my brief attempts at looking haven't turned up anything.