Python + Java Integration

[Paul Boddie]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> Ben Sizer wrote:
>
> > Java itself never deserved to be the 'next' anything anyway.
>
>     I've had a lot of developers come up to me and
>     say, "I haven't had this much fun in a long time.
>     It sure beats writing Cobol" -- James Gosling

Nice quote! It also reinforces the impression that there are many
people working with technology who don't have very much control over
the tools they get to use - you could replace Cobol with VB in the
quote and it'd still echo the sentiments of a large number of
developers.

Of course, it's just not accurate to imply that Java had nothing to
offer: in an age when a number of languages provided support for safe
execution (Obliq, Telescript, Safe-Tcl, etc.) and where a few had
in-built support for concurrency (Ada, Occam, etc.), Java rather
effectively brought both of these and more to the mainstream. It may be
true that the language didn't justify the hype and that the API was
fairly badly designed in various places, but it represented a step up
for most developers, and the hype managed to give many of those
developers a chance or an excuse to use the language, rather than be
forbidden to use it because it didn't fit in with corporate or
organisational strategy.

There are parallels with Rails in the Java hype story: something better
than what lots of people are using (probably PHP in most cases),
combined with a dose of hype to persuade decision makers that everyone
else in the herd is moving in that direction, leads to something
suddenly becoming popular, being perceived as the next big thing, and
having lots of vocal evangelists who might seem like wise men to the
masses, but whose pronouncements on dynamic languages, for example,
seem belated and obvious to many of us. For those inclined to panic at
such a spectacle, a perusal of the comp.lang.python/python-list
archives for 1996-1998 might be informative to see how a community can
adapt sensibly to such events.

Paul