Saturday 24 November 2012

Before the Beginning


  • Guido Van Rossum created the language of python, to this day he remains the benevolent dictator for life (but he is also mortal). Read his history of python here.
  • Jim Hugunin invented JPython and was the primary developer while he was at CNRI. In February 1999, Jim left CNRI for sunny California and Barry Warsaw became the primary maintainer. When Barry and the rest of PythonLabs left CNRI, Barry renamed JPython to Jython, put the sources on SourceForge and made Finn Bock the primary maintainer. Many others are now involved with the project.
  • Python's inventor Guido van Rossum and the rest of PythonLabs continues to help and support Jython by their understanding of how Jython must live with the limits of Java.
  • Ben Fry and Casey Reas developed processing using java
  • Jonathan Feinberg developed processing.py
Both python and processing are at turning points, with Guido pushing for a transition to versions 3+ from the 2 series, and processing going from processing-1.5.1 to processing-2.0. Processing.py depends on java processing, and currently Jonathan has made preparations to transition to processing-2.0. However processing.py also depends on jython so is stuck with its latest incarnation, that shows no signs of transitioning to python-3 any time soon. The latest released version of jython, as of spring 2013 is jython-2.5.3 (or jython-2.7b1 alpha version).  This is not fatal negative but it is just a bit unfortunate (jruby in contrast is much more up to date, and their developers are actively involved with improving the jvm).
Since processing-2.0 there is no support for the export of java (web) applets, and so there are fewer reasons to prefer regular processing over processing.py.

Something I think worth mentioning here is that contrary to a lot of ill informed opinion java and certainly the jvm is not going away anytime soon (despite one might think of concerted efforts from Microsoft and Apple, and since the openjdk initiative nor are they at the mercy of the whims of Oracle). Also despite possible performance problems with jython in the past, in my experience is that it is not as fast as pypy but it probably outperforms cpython.  Furthermore processing.py outperforms pyprocessing even when the latter is compiled with pypy.
See my experience with latest update here, why aren't people navigating beyond my opening post?

No comments:

Post a Comment