(JRuby || IronPython) && !Jython

[cariaso]

Programming languages are born, grow a community of users, and then wither. They almost never die, but we often wish some would. The ones that thrive fill an ecological niche, such as searching a database, or helping to install other programs.

By sheer numbers, the language of choice today is Java. I see the benefits, but its not my language of

Comments

;)

[eekbitz]

dork.

[cardinalximinez]

There are certain advantages to being a C++ geek. ;)

[cariaso]

I don't know how much you use the STL, and how much it makes C++ tolerable, but I've been spoiled by the newer dynamic languages.

1. I never want to free a malloc again.

2. Dictionaries/hashes are gift from god.

capitols = {'FL' : 'Tallahassee', 'CA':'Sacramento'}
capitols['NY'] = 'Albany'
print capitols['FL']

3. Exception handling that makes it trivial to dump the stack.

4. Perl is still my most natural language, so I'll use it's syntax for regular expressions
($first, $last) = $fullname =~ /(\w+) (\w+)/;

5. God bless Data::Dumper

6. Refactoring in Java is a joy

I've just been spoiled and I'm not going back. Do you have access to these sort of things from C++ easily these days? Or is it still the language I know from MPIBlast.

One more geek thing. I now run www.snpedia.com off of the Amazon compute cloud. Its overkill for a webserver, but there are serious benefits and it gives me a chance to explore it before porting my parallel application there. It rocks.

[cariaso]

Courtesy of Andrew Dalke who is currently blocked from posting to livejournal, due to his ISP's proxy configuration.

1. Preach it brother!

2. C++ has ways to do that better than the good old days. I haven't
touched C++ seriously since the ealry days of STL and don't know it.

3. Also handy to dump the stack when debugging. "Who's calling this
function? traceback.print_stack()"

4. first, last = fullname.split(None, 1)? That at least handles
"Georgia O'Keefe" and "Lawrence Watt-Evans".

6. I've heard about that, and in Smalltalk too. Never had a chance to
experience it.

Regarding small languages - remember, I'm the one learning Swedish. :)

[cariaso]

And now me actually replying to Andrew:

4. perl can handle O'Keefe's and Watt-Evans with a slightly more complicated regex, but it gets scary quickly.
($first, $last) = $fullname =~ /(\w+) (\w+(?:['-]\w)*)/;

6. I've still never spent any quality time with Smalltalk. Folks who have swear by it. Everything I know says it was perfect, but ahead its time. There is still a need for languages that bridge from imperative to OO, because humans are feeble creatures of habit.

Jython

[anonymous]

Jython is not dying. It has pushed out new releases recently and is on target for getting up to date with CPython in the next major release.

By unofficial I suppose you mean that it isn't backed by a 'major company' (is CPython official?). It has a team of core developers and is accepted by the Python community as being the 'official Java implementation of Python' though.

Michael Foord
http://www.ironpython.info/

Re: Jython

[cariaso]

In the last 11 months I've gotten far deeper into python (and Haskell of late). Heck I'm even busting out some old school bioPerl lately. But I've been away from Java, and I'm happy to stay that way. As a result I haven't had much need for Jython

Re: Jython

[cariaso]

Frank Wierzbicki,

I salute you. Congrats on today's release of Jython2.5.

Re: Jython

[cariaso]

Frank, is now leaving Sun
http://fwierzbicki.blogspot.com/2009/11/leaving-sun.html

He resurrected jython, and did so not just as a one man army, but as a clear leader. Nothing but respect. Good luck in whatever comes next.