After his presentation, I caught up with John Lam to drill down on his work at Microsoft.
The #1 goal for Iron Ruby is to run "real" Ruby programs on Windows. Lam expects to finish implementing the Ruby language by year end and hope to show a first "hello world" demo at the Rails Conference next month.
For Lam, Ruby is so hot because of Rails, "a framework that hit the sweet-spot for the pragmatic developers".

"Rails is a lot closer to being the Visual Foxpro of the 90s... or the new VisualBasic", said Lam.

Lam is also concerned about the cannibalisation of Ruby.

"It's happening because there are 5 funded versions of Ruby...You don't see 5 funded implementations of Java... So what's tricky about Ruby, the language, is that it doesn't have a form of specification... unfortunately that doesn't work very well... So without a spec, everyone is going to implement it the way they want... and what you are going to see is that Ruby is going to break", Lam warned.