Mark Ramm-Christensen posed some questions about using the JVM as a platform for dynamic languages. Many people do, in fact, use dynamic languages on the JVM (Groovy, Beanshell, Rhino, Jython, JRuby are some big ones… and don’t forget Scala, Nice and other “non-dynamic” languages that target the JVM). But Java the platform has not gotten widespread or serious attention until recently (witness the recent resurgence of Jython, the rise of JRuby and the coming of the Da Vinci Machine).

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As programming languages go, Python is hot. It was TIOBE’s language of the year in 2007 because of its fast growth. Python’s performance, while certainly good enough for most applications, is middle of the road in the grand scheme of languages. This has led to efforts like Psyco and Cython to make Python faster as needed.

We’re pleased to introduce the latest SitePen-supported open source project: Psychotic. As the name implies, Psychotic is inspired by the previous work of Psyco. Indeed, speeding up your program with Psychotic is just as easy as it is with Psyco:

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The PyCon 2008 talk videos are making their way up to YouTube. My talk is not yet there, and the footage they’re putting up right now is the “raw” footage from the camera at the back of the room. I have posted a screencast version of my talk, “Rich UI Webapps with TurboGears 2 and Dojo”:

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