From: Richard Conroy Date: 2006-09-08T21:04:36+09:00 Subject: Re: Sun hires JRuby developers. On 9/8/06, Farrel Lifson wrote: > I wonder if Sun plans to push Ruby on the JVM now that IronPython 1.0 > has been released? I think they are just hedging their bets. Sun have always been about keeping java interoperable. They like people doing language hybrid solutions as long as one of the languages is Java. JNI was there from the start, RMI was altered to run over IIOP, and the industrial strength XML support means you can talk to any other system if its got some kind of schema. Ruby is especially appealing to Java developers. Its a good syntax fit as it is directly applicable for a lot of things that you might use Java for, and addresses a lot of things that are a nuisance in Java. A lot of the .NET stuff like C# just isn't different enough to warrant learning, PHP/Perl can be a bit limited in applicability, and Python, while a good equivalent to Ruby has a syntax style that is less of a fit. Python has been around a while and so has JPython, and they have swiped some mindshare, but Ruby is really appealing to a Java mindset, and Sun is betting on Jave/Ruby being the next Big Language Hybrid for Java. JRuby has some impressive ideas too. Its early days yet, but the language penetration is pretty significant. Its not just Ruby code calling Java code, or deeper stacks, or exception propogation, IIRC you can derive Ruby classes from Java types (even interfaces) and possibly even do Ruby style aspect oriented programming things like add behaviour & alter java types at runtime ... interesting stuff indeed. Still JRuby has a bit to go. They got some startup performance issues, and you can't use it everywhere that you would use the regular Ruby interpreter, hence the sponsoring.