Microsoft has Iron Python...
Sun has picked up JRuby. Boy, you would think this dynamic language thing was important, or something. I did find two things to quibble with, one in the Ruby posting:
Will they [ed: The JRuby guys] work on JRuby full time?
Yes, but they also have a mandate to think about developer tools. Right now, developers who use dynamic languages like Python and Ruby are poorly served, compared to what Java developers have.
Perhaps Tim missed Smalltalk, which has always had superior tools.
Then, patrick Logan spotted this (via Jon Udell) from Jim Hugenin:
I'm not a dynamic language zealot, and in general I don't really understand zealots. I wrote the first three versions of the IronPython compiler in Python, but today it's written in C#. Part of the reason is that now I understand it, so the values of prototyping, and the looser thinking that really helped a lot in the early days, don't really help as much any more. Also there are now more people working on the compiler, and there are some real benefits to the static typing, and the support you can get from Visual Studio.
Well, I think Jim missed the boat there. Why? Well, it came up in Georg's talk about ObjectStudio 8 today. ObjectStudio 8 will be hosted inside VisualWorks, and the compiler (which was in C in classic OST) is now a subclass of the SmalltalkCompiler in VW. Why is that good? Because it made the whole process a heck of a lot easier: you write Smalltalk faster than C (or C#), period. It's also a heck of a lot more extensible that way. Having a language level compiler for Iron Python would have opened up a lot of cool things to developers; having it in C# just locks it away in useless-land.
Technorati Tags: dynamic+languages
Comments
a question and a quibble
[ Troy Brumley] September 7, 2006 16:20:57.423
Comment by Troy Brumley
Why didn't Sun look at Jython? It's viable and running easily on various open source Java stack environments.
While I bitch mightily about .NET when compared to Smalltalk, C# is not C or C++, and from what I see it can be much more expressive than either of the older languages. C in the name and Java/C like syntax are just, uh, honey--yeah, honey, that's it--to attract the flies/programmers who feel comfortable with that. The real value is in the libraries and CLR, and I think building a compiler in C# would be much easier than in C or C++.
Another Example...
[Travis Griggs] September 7, 2006 17:36:25.113
IIRC... The Dolphin Smalltalk compiler was written in C++ and buried in the VM. How surprised they were when John Brant and Don Roberts wrote a scanner/parser, not only capable of supporting compilation but also parse tree matching, in Smalltalk. And it ran faster than there's.
There was plans to follow suit and lift the Dolphin compiler out of its C++ form. I don't know if it ever did happen.
He booked a ticket on another boat
[Rick] September 8, 2006 23:06:01.514
What are you talking about? There's nothing about being dynamic or static or C# that would have prevented him from exposing a compiler API. CLR languages like Nemerle and Boo do that already.