Interview with Jim Baker

Welcome to the Jim Baker interview form for August 2008!

This month, Jim Baker will take your questions regarding "all things" Jython. In case you aren't familiar with Jim, he is one of the leading Jython committers, and he has helped to develop much of what we use today.

Thanks to everyone for your participation...this is a great opportunity for the Jython community. Special thanks to Jim Baker for his time!

Josh Juneau

Gather Event Planning juneau001@gmail.com

Questions for Jim

1. Where do you see Jython going over the next two or three years? Things are really looking great right now, do you think it will continue to evolve into a language that stays more current with future Python releases?

Question By: Josh Juneau

2. With the new ANTLR back end, are Jython ast's mutable ? Is it possible to modify the associated file name and line number ? If so, are there any examples of how to do this ?

Question By: Lysander David

3. The use of Python for scientific computing has been growing the last years (scipy, numpy and so on). On the other hand, java is very used for such kind of applications too. Then, do you think that Jython can be an interesting open source alternative for scientific communities, or the direction of the development of Jython will be exclusively centered in other applications as web applications?

Question By: Josu Jugo

4. I notice there is a real strong development market using J2ME I also notice C python is lacking in this area. How does Jython utilize these technologies.

Question By: Andrew Evans

Question By: Joshua Long

5. Invokedynamic is slowly but steadily being added into the JVM. Will there be a move to support that when it's available. Similarly, is there any possibility of porting things like Stackless python to the JVM, to achieve the sort of high velocity execution found in Erlang and Scala? Last, the first question asked it with aplomb, but basically, what do you expect Jython's support for Python 3000 will be? Will you fork to maintain the older code base as well? Is Python 3k an intimidating problem or is it just a few patches on the grammar? Either way, glad someone's developing Jython again, keep up the great work!

Question By: Greg Moore

Jim, I left these rather vague because I'm sure you have a different POV on things then users and different perspectives are always a good thing. Thanks to you and all the developers for all your time and effort on this project.

6. What do you see as some of the bigger challenges that Jython faces in the future?

7. whats your vision of the future with regard to Jython?