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On the heels of Microsoft's release of IronPython 1.0 comes the news that Sun has hired the two primary JRuby developers.

I don't know if Sun intended it, but the juxtaposition of these two news item gives the effect that the two managed execution environments—The JVM and .NET—have each chosen an anointed champion scripting language for their platform.

The orphan that's left out of the spotlight is Jython. I feel kind of sad for Jython and its lone publicly known active maintainer Frank Wierzbicki.

Just think about it, Jython was a pretty good scripting language for the Java platform since the last millenium. Yet Sun shunned scripting languages for the JVM at the time. I remember a Jon Udell column on the old Byte magazine discussing issues related to efficient implementations of language features of the various scripting languages.

Now, six or seven years later, Sun turned around on the scripting languages for the JVM issue. Yet the darling in Sun's hand is someone else.

Such is life :(