Jython Reborn
Discussing at lunch with Jake today about Jython I said that Python is the real missing language from the JVM and Sun should be interested in bringing Python on the JVM exactly as JRuby. Well I learned tonight listening to Chris McAvoy at the Polyglot Programmer meeting that Jython is far from being dead. Judging from the fact that the current project leader was hired by Sun some months ago it looks like the future will be full of surprises. Here’s an interesting article by Chris about it.
To further support the good news, we also had the Django on Jython practical demo tonight. Django is similar to Rails, with a nice embedded scaffolding which doesn’t require a specific generation step. No migrations though, but Python has an impressive set of libraries to offer that would be really nice to have on the JVM. And, by the way, Python is a powerful language even without considering the libraries. I developed only one console application with Python to handle huge Root tuples for physics analysis on the grid and I was up and running with all the TDD tooling in a week. Great experience.
It’s surprising to see how the robustness and slick design of the JVM is also the worst enemy of Java the language. The fact that Sun is pushing so hard on the direction of multiple languages on the JVM makes me think that Java has started an inexorable but well planned decline.
1 year ago