Another Year of the Snake

In a blog post earlier this year I posted about Python's growing popularity in 2007. Since then the following events have unfolded:

• Last month Sun announced that they were hiring two key Python developers -  Ted Leung, an Apache Software Foundation (ASF) member and long-time Python developer at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF), and Frank Wierzbicki, lead implementer of the Jython project. This is a similar move to the one Sun made in 2006, hiring 2 key Ruby/JRuby developers. Jython is an implementation of the Python language on the Java Virtual machine (JVM), and it was announced that the two new hires will be working full-time on Jython and paying particular attention to developer tools.
• On April 8th Google announced the Google App Engine which lets you run your Web applications on Google's infrastructure. Although controversial, this ambitious new project offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable Web application platform that is attracting a lot of attention in the market. And the first programming language that this environment supports is of course - Python.
• New alpha versions have been released of the next revolutionary Python language version - Python 3000 and there are plans to release a beta version sometime this year.

With all of this activity around the Python programming language, it seems to me that its popularity will continue to climb in 2008 as well. Here at SharedBook we are thrilled by this since we are investing a lot in Python (alongside Java) and developing some cool applications using it. Besides Blog2Print we are using Python for some of our partner integrations.

Learning Python is easy. So go ahead and give it a try - the official (and highly recommended) tutorial can be found here. If you are new to programming or even if you've never programmed before you can go to this page and find some useful resources to learn programming using Python.