Hackety Hack: Silverlight?

Hey, remember when I was talking about how the Xbox 360 is almost, just about, a killer platform for teaching coding to kids? Remember how I thought it was possibly just around the corner? There are interesting new twists in this saga this week...

Following the coat-tails of Silverlight 1.0 Beta, Microsoft has just released the first public alpha version of Silverlight 1.1. Crazy, huh? The big difference is the one I had been expecting for some time: Silverlight 1.1 includes a cross-platform Compact Framework-like mini-CLR. Here's the kicker of a huge surprise twist: Silverlight 1.1 also includes the first official alpha release of the Dynamic Language Runtime. IronPython (2.0), IronRuby, and Managed JScript are all going to be officially supported Silverlight languages.

First of all, I am curious as to how far away, then, DLR for the 360 is...

Second, with this announcement I think Silverlight becomes a potential killer platform for teaching coding skills with dynamic languages in the Hackety Hack vein: easily deployable via the web (small cross-platform toolkit [1]), powerful "real" languages, good young people-friendly sandboxing...

XAML isn't a bad alternative to XHTML, either.

[1]

I realize the small exception the Microsoft still hasn't promised a Linux version of Silverlight... Hopefully that's an oversight that will be corrected shortly. Just to start further rumors, because I can, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Xbox and Zune may show up as Silverlight platforms as well...