Lonely Lion

Hi,

Just a quick note to say that I’ve left Twitter and Facebook. Both are nice sites, with lots of good things to say about them, but I didn’t want to be on either of them anymore. The only real explanation I can offer is that I’m a luddite anachronist (a word that I made up) who wants to remain social, but in more specific ways.

What does that mean? Well, I haven’t shut down my flickr, chess.com, google buzz, and threadless accounts, so it’s not that I’m anti-online-social network. Just not into twitter and facebook anymore. Deleting my accounts was really a non-event, given the small size of my respective networks, but it’s come up a few times, so I wanted to let folks know that I’m a-ok, just off twitter and facebook.

Email me. I like email.

I’m often heard to mutter, “The JVM is the future man…if you’re a Python or Ruby developer, you should really get up on it. It’s the future.” Google agrees with me (it isn’t the first time, they’re constantly hitting me up for advice). They released the JVM for Appengine complete with a fancy Eclipse plugin.

Although the majority of the documentation talks about the release of Java for Appengine, there’s an important distinction to make…they reallly released the JVM for Appengine, as evidenced by this nice post about which JVM languages will work on Appengine.

So, really, in one swoop, they released Jython, JRuby, Scala, Javascript, and Clojure. That’s pretty slick.

Sure Java is arguably way less nice than Python and Ruby, but the JVM is pretty great. Languages that target it as a platform open up a lot of otherwise closed Enterprise doors. If you want to write Python or Ruby as your day-job, you should really start paying attention to the JVM.

Pycon 2009, as of 2pm on Friday, is the best Pycon I’ve been to yet.  The talks this year are really well put together, it’s clear that the speakers are high caliber and spent time on their talks.  Despite the lower attendance numbers (thanks Economy!), it feels like Python is poised for some significant growth.

The Python VM panel, with representatives from Jython, IronPython, PyPy, cPython, and the relatively new Google-cPython-speedup project-unladen-swallow, is laying out a future for Python the language points pretty clearly at “Python is an objectively good language, let’s get rid of this silly implementation idea.”  Meaning, developers want to write Python, and they want it to run everywhere, and they want to leverage other tools, regardless of origin language, in their language of choice, which…thankfully, is Python.