Both of these two projects attempted to solve a problem that very few people have - using .NET libraries from Python and Ruby. In exchange, you had to give up all of your existing native libraries. That is a trade-off that very few people wanted. Source: I started the IronRuby project.
I learned this lesson the hard way a few times in my career - always have respect for people's existing code investments.
I can't speak to Ruby, but Microsoft has an active Python group.[1] Granted, it seems to focus on Visual Studio (which I'm told has excellent Python tooling) and Azure.
Neat, but that doesn't seem to be integrated into .NET like IronPython was (well, is, just not maintained it seems). Which is what the post I was responding to was talking about.
I used to love Python when I came to it years about after slogging along through QBasic, VB6, C++ and C, but in this day and age, it doesn't really offer much to me over doing things in modern C#, especially on the CLR. I appreciate some of the changes that were made to the runtime to support IronPython, like dynamic support and the DLR, but if I'm going to be doing something not-C#, then I'd rather go towards F#.
Last IronRuby release: 2011