As part of the big hullabaloo around Mix ’07, Microsoft announced their new Silverlight product, which is basically a less cracked-out Flash, which lets you use .NET languages (including IronPython) to create Flash-like animations and games. Finally, people can design awesome UIs and use a programming language that isn’t evil.

But more importantly, MS created a compiler for Ruby that compiles to MSIL called IronRuby. This means I can use Ruby at work and actually have other people use it. It also means that I might even learn this Silverlight thing if I can create awesome UIs in Ruby, and have it be cross-platform (even though “cross-platform” apparently doesn’t include Linux, don’t worry; Miguel’s gonna have that shit covered post-haste).