Sun Hires Two Key Python Developers

sspringer writes to let us know about Sun's continuing push to support scripting languages other than Java on its Java virtual machine. Sun just hired two key Python developers: Ted Leung, a long-time Python developer at the Open Source Applications Foundation, and Frank Wierzbicki, who is lead implementer of the Jython project. They will both work on Jython, which enables Python to run on the JVM. Last month Sun's CEO said the company wants to "take the J off the JVM and just make it a VM."

Comments

Re:What happened to Tcl?

[morgan_greywolf]

John Ousterhout used to work for Sun and they had a golden opportunity to push Tcl a bit more and integrate it with Java... but they never did much with Tcl and he eventually left. It's a shame, because I rather liked Tcl with its absurdly minimal syntax. Aside from a few niches (mostly, strangely enough, in the realm of scientific computing), Tcl never quite became very mainstream. Sure, it sits quietly on almost every Linux and BSD distro, and sure there are a few things here and there written Tcl or Tcl/Tk, and almost every seasoned Unix developer knows at least a bit of Tcl, the mainstream audience has been eaten by Python and Perl, for the most part. Probably something to do with that 'absurdly minimal syntax', though I guess that still doesn't explain Perl. ;)

Um, not just Jython

[tbray]

Well, no, if you check Ted's blog, you'll see that he's going to be working on Python-in-general, not just Jython.

Re:Inevitable, and very welcome

[benjymouse]

Yes, and Microsofts strong focus on multiple languages from the onset also gives the CLR/DLR some clear advantages over the JVM.

The CLR was built around a the notion of a Common Type System (CTS) which means that different languages can share actual objects without having to wrap them. Wrapping cost performance (wrapping and unwrapping when passing between languages). But wrapping is also inherently language-pair oriented, i.e. between 2 pairs of languages such as Java and Jython. Other dynamic language cannot inherently use Jython objects but must also wrap the "canonical" java objects. It is not that it is impossible to achieve on the JVM platform, it's just that Microsoft has a much more mature VM and type system for this kind of job.

Take Java generics. The JVM type system have no notion of "template" or "generics", hence the generics in Java are implemented through the dreaded type erasure. But that means that no other language (e.g. Scala) can share generic types with Java. Contrast that with the CLR where generics are 1st class type citizens, both in their generic form and when all type parameters has been fully bound.

Interestingly, the CLR/CTS seems to have been developed seperately from (but coordinated with) C#. The CLR type system can actually represent types which you cannot describe using C# or VB.NET. The CTS is "bigger" and more generalized if you will. The Java VM was always just aimed at serving the Java bytecode. This is something that is going to haunt the JVM now when they are going all multi-language and dynamic.

Re:Nothing New... 12 years later

[TheRaven64]

As someone who tried to get a Smalltalk compiler to target the JVM, I can say from experience that it is a really horrible design (and .NET copied all of the worst design decisions). The VM imposes so many constraints that it's really hard to implement anything that isn't semantically almost identical to Java on it without seriously compromising the speed. A far better approach is LLVM, which allows you to layer things like garbage collection and object models on top of a common VM.

Re:What happened to Tcl?

[Otter]

There was a time when Tcl/Tk was the least excruciating way of making a simple GUI application on Unix. Once decent toolkits (and, eventually, excellent toolkits) became available, Tcl's main selling point was lost.

Re:Inevitable, and very welcome

[Headius]

Generics are basically no help at all to dynamic languages, so I think that's a red herring. And in fact, it makes implementing interop with dynamic languages much more difficult, since it's an additional class of types you have to be able to deal with and recognize. Ask the IronPython and IronRuby guys about the syntax they've had to come up with to support manipulating generics from within Python or Ruby.

The only problem the JVM has, as far as I can see, is that it's got this whole "Java" thing wrapped around it. The JVM itself is much better suited to all sorts of languages, if only we can punch a hole through the Java exterior. And that's exactly what we're going to do, by adding dynamic invocation support in (hopefully) JDK7 and a host of other features like tail calls, tuples, value objects, continuations, and so on in OpenJDK subprojects like the Multi-Language VM.

If anything, the CLR is a much more difficult platform to develop dynamic languages for due to its strict static-typed nature. You have to do some really unpleasant tricks to get the CLR to run a dynamic language fast, and that costs a lot of development time and hassle. DLR hopes to make some of that happen across all languages, but at the end of the day the CLR is just not as advanced a VM as the JVM.

At any rate, it's going to be an interesting couple of years.

Re:too little too late

[Headius]

You're probably half right. I think it stems from a realization that Java doesn't have to be the only tool on the JVM. And to that end, we're working hard to improve the ecosystem for language development in a number of ways. Heck, some of the most interesting parts of JRuby aren't even written in Java anymore...they're generated programmatically. Java is just one way to create JVM bytecode. We need both better tools for creating bytecode for many languages, and a better way to make the JVM's dynamic underpinnings serve many languages. We're working on both.

Re:wow; parrot has had an impact.

[Otter]

Basically, Leung lost his job, posted on his blog that he was looking, someone at Sun read it and they made him an offer. I don't think this whole thing is nearly as elaborately crafted a strategy as people are making out.

Re:What happened to Tcl?

[korbin_dallas]

Wrong.

Tcl biggest selling point now is the packaging and deployement.

I've written apps in a lot of languages, and deployed them all. Absolutely nothing beats Tcl for cross platform deployments. I got a starkit for ppc405, wrote my app on x86. A simple script packaged it all up in less than 2Mb.
Another few lines, and I had a win32, linux and ppc405 single file executable(for each) ready to go.

We also use java, which requires a separate 20Mb JRE install, whether its in your distro or not, you still need it, and the right version. Oh and Java 1.5 and Java 1.6 jar classes are incompatible, HAHA. And how many of you out there have a JRE for ppc405 (not a Mac, but a older series used in embedded systems)? Tcl is deployed on far more architectures.

The 8.4 and later versions are very fast and lightweight.

Making a gui in Tk is fine and simple, and well, you're gonna make a gui in Tk if you use Perl, Python, Ruby anyway.

All those other tools could learn from the Tcl packaging design.