March 4th, 2008
Python's future looks bright
It always warms my heart to see good programmers get the recognition they deserve. This week, Sun announced they were hiring Ted Leung (long-time Python developer), and Frank Wierzbicki (lead implementer of the Jython project). They’ll be working full-time on Jython and in particular paying attention to developer tools.
Ted and Frank join Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo, and others who have been cherry-picked in recent months by Sun from the open source community to a) work on the things they love, and b) actually get paid for it.
Wierzbicki writes:
I don’t think I can overstate just how excited I am about this. For a long time now I’ve been obsessed with Jython. Now I will be able to let my obsession take over completely.
In his blog, Leung noted:
I have not written about it much, but I’ve been very impressed with how Sun has handled the JRuby project. Tim told me that Sun was interested in ramping up their support for Python in a similar fashion, and asked if I would be interested in coming to Sun to lead such an effort. After a bunch of talking and interviewing and so forth, it turns out that I was very interested.
Both developers credited Sun’s Tim Bray for making this happen. “As anybody who watches this space knows,” says Tim, “we’ve been pouring increasing amounts of love on dynamic languages recently. Well, er, on Ruby, to be precise. But you know, Ruby’s not the only game in town.”
CPython and Jython will continue to be completely open source, same as before. Sun has applied for membership to the PSF and the PSF will continue to be the steward of Jython’s code.
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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| 03/06/08
