In a move of significance to all Python users Sun Microsystems has broadened its support for dynamic languages still further. There was some interest in their announcement less than six months ago that they had hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, developers of JRuby.
Today we learn that they have recruited Frank Wierzbicki and Ted Leung. Frank has been one of the two principal maintainers of the Jython project for a good long time now, and has brought the language forward to the point where it supports the newnew-style classes, a significant milestone in compatibility with CPython. Ted is a long-time member of the Apache Software Foundation who was a member of the OSAF's Chandler team for the last four years.
Sun was a great employer for me (I was badge number 1536, I believe, starting back in 1985), and I hope that Frank and Ted enjoy working there. It's certainly a great place to meet people with exceptional intelligence, and the fact that both Sun and Microsoft are now visibly taking a serious approach to dynamic languages in general and Python in particular is terrific.
Sun and Microsoft are both sponsoring this year's PyCon, for which registrations recently topped 900. If you want to meet them there then you still have four days to register at the pre-conference prices!
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C Clarke
Musings from the technological frontier
2 comments:
If I remember correctly, I think Sun hired JRuby developers sometime in late 2006. Just so that we are on same page about how much time it took for JRuby to the place it is now.
Aanonymous: You are right, I was a year out. How time flies when you're enjoying yourself.
Interestingly it took Jim Hugunin quite a long time to get IronPython up to speed after he joined the CLR team at Microsoft. This may well be a measure of how long it takes to adapt the corporate culture to open source, in which case Jython developments may benefit from work already done for JRuby.
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