In what seems like an interesting bit of corporate tit for tat I noticed the following two announcements this week
In his blog post entitled IronPython 1.0 released today! Jim Hugunin of Microsoft writes
I’m extremely happy to announce that we have released IronPython 1.0 today! I started work on IronPython almost 3 years ago. My initial motivation for the project was to understand all of the reports that I read on the web claiming that the Common Language Runtime (CLR) was a terrible platform for Python and other dynamic languages. I was surprised to read these reports because I knew that the JVM was an acceptable platform for these languages. About 9 years ago I’d built an implementation of Python that ran on the JVM originally called JPython and later shortened to Jython. This implementation ran a little slower than the native C-based implementation of Python (CPython), but it was easily fast enough and stable enough for production use – testified to by the large number of Java projects that incorporate Jython today....The more time I spent working on IronPython and with the CLR, the more excited I became about its potential to finally deliver on the vision of a single common platform for a broad range of languages....IronPython is about bringing together two worlds. The key value in IronPython is that it is both a true implementation of Python and is seamlessly integrated with the .NET platform.
I’m extremely happy to announce that we have released IronPython 1.0 today!
I started work on IronPython almost 3 years ago. My initial motivation for the project was to understand all of the reports that I read on the web claiming that the Common Language Runtime (CLR) was a terrible platform for Python and other dynamic languages. I was surprised to read these reports because I knew that the JVM was an acceptable platform for these languages. About 9 years ago I’d built an implementation of Python that ran on the JVM originally called JPython and later shortened to Jython. This implementation ran a little slower than the native C-based implementation of Python (CPython), but it was easily fast enough and stable enough for production use – testified to by the large number of Java projects that incorporate Jython today....The more time I spent working on IronPython and with the CLR, the more excited I became about its potential to finally deliver on the vision of a single common platform for a broad range of languages....IronPython is about bringing together two worlds. The key value in IronPython is that it is both a true implementation of Python and is seamlessly integrated with the .NET platform.
In other news, Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems has a blog post entitled JRuby Love where he writes
Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, better known as “The JRuby Guys”, are joining Sun this month. Yes, I helped make this happen, and for once, you’re going to be getting the Sun PR party line, because I wrote most of it. Jacki DeCoster, one of our PR people, tried to imagine what kinds of questions people would have, and we went from there. Why is Sun hiring JRuby developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo? · First, they are excellent developers. Technologies like Ruby are getting intense interest from the developer community, and Sun is interested in anything that developers care about. ¶ What will their new role be at Sun? · First, they have to get JRuby to 1.0 and make sure that the major applications are running smoothly and are performant.
Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, better known as “The JRuby Guys”, are joining Sun this month. Yes, I helped make this happen, and for once, you’re going to be getting the Sun PR party line, because I wrote most of it.
Jacki DeCoster, one of our PR people, tried to imagine what kinds of questions people would have, and we went from there.
Why is Sun hiring JRuby developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo? · First, they are excellent developers. Technologies like Ruby are getting intense interest from the developer community, and Sun is interested in anything that developers care about. ¶
What will their new role be at Sun? · First, they have to get JRuby to 1.0 and make sure that the major applications are running smoothly and are performant.
Interesting times indeed. My time spent on working with XML has made me appreciate the power of dynamic languages and I'll definitely be givin gIronPython a shot. I've started reading Dive Into Pythonand once I'm done I think my first programming assignment will be to write an IBlogExtension plugin for RSS Bandit that lets you post to your blog using Windows Live Writer.