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

What happened to Tcl?

[Ed Avis]

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.

A VM is just another PLATFORM!

[StCredZero]

A VM should just be treated as just another Platform! It's a virtual CPU, and instruction set architecture. Taking this further, a language and a set of libraries packaged with a VM should also be considered a Platform just as Windows XP or Ubuntu 7.10 is a Platform. This is precisely why Java version hell exists! You should not update platforms willy-nilly. You should not take a platform and bundle it with an application! If you are smart, you should either make everything supremely backwards compatible (Windows) or supremely upgradeable (Debian based Linux) or make a clean (and well organized) break that provides dramatic benefits (Mac OS X).

Sun didn't get it. Dot-Net got it because they were able to use hindsight to fill in the gaps where Sun didn't. The truth is, VMs and portable languages don't make operating systems irrelevant. They just (partially) virtualize the OS on top of the native one. The sooner VM language people realize this, and all of the pitfalls, the sooner things will get better! (Many already get things right. Python and Ruby seem to get this.)

Re:A VM is just another PLATFORM!

[jilles]

What Java version hell?! It's perfectly backwards compatible (binary and api, minor API bug fixes and deprecations aside). I've been developing on it since 1995 so I have some idea what I'm talking about. I think Java is probably one of the cleanest evolving platforms around (given the massive changes to it since 1995). Compare this to linux where binary compatibility is routinely broken for minor compiler version increments or libc updates. Compare this to C++ which didn't even have a widely endorsed spec until this millennium and continues to have many incompatible compilers (never mind the APIs, I'm just talking about the language semantics here). Arguably, C++ is still a mess.

I think you are also wrong about virtualization. The whole point of virtualization is to abstract away OS specifics to the point where it literally is nothing more than a commodity needed to run the vm. Who cares if it is mac, windows or linux running your php/Java/ruby server? If you are doing LAMP development, virtualization is what allows you to scale your new hot web application using Amazon provided service on demand stuff. Stuff like JRuby shows that virtualization can actually be fast and scalable too (it's basically kicking regular ruby's ass). Jython is basically going the same way.

Microsoft certainly had the right ideas with .Net. Their execution is less than perfect, however. Basically an old Java 1.4 hotspot VM still kicks the CLR's ass easily. In terms of scalability and performance there is really no contest between the two. Nevermind, later versions. However, the CLR design is interesting in some respects and some of the stuff MS has done on top of it is quite innovative. But the truth is that the Java platform is still a fine piece of engineering. Many controversial design decisions taken by Sun in the early nineties around this platform are now slowly being picked up elsewhere too. Basically modern compiler architectures like llvm bring stuff that Sun has been doing for years with Java to mainstream. The whole notion of garbage collection has basically displaced the notion of manually allocating memory (except in the most conservative environments). People do web development in environments that are much slower, crappier and less secure than Java (cough php cough) because development speed is so nice to have. In short pretty much everything Java is doing on the server side has been validated through others imitating with varying degrees of success.