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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Applying the cluestick
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Tim Bray has some interesting thoughts about dynamic languages:
First, we should get serious about dynamic languages. I totally don 19t see any reason why we shouldn 19t try to become a world leader in this space. They are the only thing on the horizon that 19s going to steal mindshare from Java in the enterprise IT ecosystem, and geeks love 19em so we should lead not follow.
Hmm - here's a thought Tim - you can become leaders in this space when the JVM stops sucking as a host for dynamic languages. Since the JVM seems to be locked in a stasis chamber, that's unlikely to happen. If Tim Bray wanted to do some positive good, he could raise this as an issue inside Sun. I have full faith in Sun being stupid about this - while MS seems to actually have a clue about this stuff:
I think that the threat from IronPython is much worse than the Bill describes. Not only does IronPython have the potential to make scripting on the JVM DOA, it also has the power to destroy Python as we know it. Jim Huginin is going to work full time to improve dynamic language support on the CLR. What happens if Bill is right and IronPython is the upgrade path for VB.NET and ASP.NET? Microsoft will start throwing large amounts of resources at IronPython. I find it hard to believe that the Python community will be able to keep up with Microsoft if they choose to do that. If Sun "gets behind Jython", you can expect a similar activity to emerge around Jython. Even worse would be for Jython development to be taken over by the JCP, all need to be compatible with CPython eliminated. Now you have two new dialects of Python, diverging from C Python and almost certainly in incompatible directions.
Watch MS make whatever changes are necessary to the CLR to make Python work well, while Sun leaves the JVM in the stasis chamber.
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