[omaha] Sun put's muscle behind Python and Solaris

[Chris Calloway]

On 3/3/2008 10:51 PM, Jeff Hinrichs - DM&T wrote:
> I often wondered that myself -- I've got some wild guesses, all
> conspiratorial in nature<g>

Frank Wierzbicki spoke at TriZPUG last year (he's local to us). And my 
impression of why Jython hasn't gotten the credit have been twofold.

One is, until Frank came along and dusted it off, Jython languished at 
Python 2.1 for a long, long time. People thought the project was dead, 
even though it was perfectly usable, because it wasn't moving forward.

But it's moving forward now, and rapidly. The other thing that kept me 
from using Jython more is that the main advantage of Python is batteries 
included. And very few Python batteries come with Jython. You're pretty 
much saying, OK, I'm using Java batteries now, but with Python syntax.

There are instances, though where you'd want to use Jython's batteries. 
Python had batteries before Java. And it ran cross platform before Java 
(that "write once, run anywhere" slogan rightfully belongs to Python). 
But some batteries are much more well developed on Java. Swing is much 
better than Tk. The SOAP batteries for Java are the best out there and 
SOAP support in Python is just awful (which is a shame since Python is a 
much better text parsing language than Java). And people are 
increasingly using Jython in places where they'd like to get around the GIL.

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway
http://www.secoora.org
office: 332 Chapman Hall   phone: (919) 599-3530
mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599