Roman’s blog

Im going to be a daddy soon ;-) Estimated day of birth: September 4th, 2006. The most asked question is whether this was intentional. The answer is yes, and we are very happy …

Nice and relaxing…

I just don’t understand why there’s no support for Jython from the big ones like Sun or IBM. Since Jim Huginin (original author of Jython) left the project some years ago, there seems to be only marginal progress. On the other hand, although it lags behind Jython is sill one of the best scripting languages for the Java Platform as you can read in the roundup of the sokoban shootout:

Unfortunately, Jython is languishing back at version 2.1, and it doesn’t look like it’ll catch up any time soon. Even so, Jython is still one of the best all-around JVM languages. For certain domains (including scripting, prototyping and unit testing), I don’t think anything out there today beats it.

Surprisingly Groovy made it into an JSR even if it seems downright half-baked compared to Jython for me. The sokoban shootout author gives it an abysmal bad rating:

Groovy failed so miserably in my JVM-languages evaluation, in so many ways, that even if it catches up to Jython someday, I’ll never know, since I never want to look at it again.

Why no boost for Jython? IBM uses Jython in its Websphere products as scripting language, but does in no way support development of Jython. Sun seems to ignore Jython completely. Certainly any commitment to Jython would be greatly appreciated by the community and would strengthen the Java platform through network effects. But nobody does, I wonder why? For Groovy status see also the thread on artima which asks: “Does Groovy matter?”

Well, for many techies now in their 30s like myself Borland was synonym for “tools from programmers for programmers”. Just remember Turbo-Pascal, Turbo-C or Delphi just to name a few (My last contact with their portfolio was with JBuilder but now I use Eclipse for my everyday development). With my nostalgic eye I followed the decay of this once great company. Now it seems they completely leave the roots of their origin. This makes me kind of sad …

Recently I saw an ironing machine on a jumble sale (it’s probably 20 to 30 years old). I wonder if there’s any marketing manager left who would call an ironing maschine “Frauenlob” (woman-praise in English) nowadays. Of course I could be totally wrong and the brand is just an allusion to a ship or a middle-age poet.

Read another interesting article from Paul Graham.
Here some enlightening quotes:

• Basically, what “Ajax” means is “Javascript now works.”

• In fact the new generation of software is being written way too fast for Microsoft even to channel it, let alone write their own in house. Their only hope now is to buy all the best Ajax startups before Google does.

• On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation.

• The very design of the average site in the late 90s was an abuse. Many of the most popular sites were loaded with obtrusive branding that made them slow to load and sent the user the message: this is our site, not yours.