Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR) was released to the public in 2000 and +was touted as a multi-language runtime. But for the first five years of its commercial life it has been mostly used for executing statically typed languages (Visual Basic, Java, C#, Eiffel, C++). There has been considerable skepticism about its ability to support more dynamic languages like Python, Perl, Ruby, and Scheme. This talk, by one of the designers of the CLR type system, introduces recent work on implementing Python on top of the CLR. I'll also discuss how the CLR is likely to evolve in the future to make it easy to build other dynamic languages on top of it.

Dr. Miller is a senior architect on Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR) team. His current work is on architectural changes to allow innovation in the core of the CLR and the managed Frameworks while preserving backward compatibility. He also serves as liaison with the academic, research, and compiler communities for the CLR team.

Dr. Miller holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and served on the faculty at Brandeis University as well as on the research staff at MIT. He has been on the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation and the Open Software Foundation. Before joining Microsoft, he was on the senior management team of the World Wide Web Consortium, reporting to Tim Berners-Lee and in charge of work on security, electronic commerce, child protection, privacy protection, accessibility, and intellectual property protection.