"…a great disturbance in the [REAL]Force. It was like a million voices crying out in unison, then suddenly silenced." - Will B. on Mars' blog.

Where do you begin on this one? It's a sad day for Real Software that someone with that level of experience leaves the company. It happens. People come and go. In the IT industry it's been my experience that getting five years out of a talented developer is almost impossible. I'm sure that Microsoft made a good offer from a money, benefits and long term stability perspective and the fact that it's in Mars' backyard doesn't hurt either.

Yes, it will hurt in the short term though it sounds like RS has known about it for a while as Aaron has been shadowing Mars for months. In the long term, new blood can be good for any product. Different ideas from a person with a different background is good. From my perspective, I just hope that Real Software's testing program gets to work double-time on any language and compiler changes - don't expect the beta testing program to find subtle compiler bugs!

It does concern me that in the past couple of years that there has been a lot of people leaving. Thankfully, there has not been a huge letdown in RB features but one has to wonder how departures affect things like Cocoa, Swordfish and release quality. New people make mistakes because they don't have a history of the project. Mistakes also happen when junior developers implement new features that were designated to be worked on by a veteran. It's not a criticism, it's just a statement.

So, good luck to Mars. I hope he does well at Microsoft and helps convert them to the good side of the force.