A Look at the Main JVM Languages Today
, February 14, 2012 The JVM hosts an increasingly wide array of languages. Here we compare the prominent ones, mourn those that have come and gone, and celebrate newborn languages clamoring for attention.
Jython (Python on Java)
One of the earlier open-source JVM languages, Jython (or as it was originally called "JPython") was intended to be a port of Python to the JVM. The implementation was close enough that most code could be run unchanged. As the language was beginning to emerge, however, its founder, Jim Hugunin, was hired away by Microsoft, where he ported Python to .NET (as IronPython). Jython did not recover from his absence and went quiet for several years. The project came back to life several years ago, but by then, it had many capable competitors.

