What is Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)?

Dynamic Language Runtime(DLR) is a runtime environment that adds set of services for dynamic languages to the Common Language Runtime.

The difference between dynamic languages and statically typed languages such as C# and Visual Basic is that you need to specify the object type at design time for the latter.

There are a lot of popular dynamic languages such as the following:

LISP
SmallTalk
Javascript
PHP
Ruby
Python
ColdFusion, Lua
Cobra and
Groovy

Dynamic languages are also excellent scripting languages used in designing Web sites; data transformations; artificial intelligence, etc.

The main driver for DLR is to create the ability to run the dynamic languages on top of the CLR. Dynamic objects (in System.dynamic) now can be used in C# and Visual Basic. This in Visual studio Community 2017.

DLR_0
Here is the architecture of DLR for IronPython and IronRuby from Microsoft documentation in MSDN.

DLR.png

How popular is JavaScript?

It has gained lot of popularity because of the many libraries developed such as jQuery, Bootstrap, Node.JS, Win.JS, dojo etc. Together with HTML5 it has become all the more popular for web development.

The popularity of a programming language is described by an index called the TIOBE Index.
TIOBE index provides a measure for the popularity of programming languages as mined from search engines. It includes many browser results as well as many programming languages. The index is published every month and for the month of January you can find it here:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Programming languages C and Java are the top dogs and Javascript jumped from 9 to 7 in January 2015 and C# steady from 2014 to 2015 at 5.

TIOBE Index is calculated by the query +"Language> programming" to the search engines.

Get more info on TIOBE herre:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/products/tics/TICS_framework.html