In the grand scheme of things, if good people leave a project, and move on to something else, so long as the “something else” is of equal or better value, the net loss is nill and the gain may be positive.

But perhaps I should rephrase my comment to be more pun-friendly: “Sun has better Java, but Adobe has better coffee.”

Eric: For what it’s worth, I found the comic funny. Surreal and patently untrue, but funny. And hey, I’m all for funny.

In business, entrepreneurs are famous for leaving a company once it is successful, because they enjoy the challenge and culture of start-ups. Once a project has “made it”, they get bored.

I have no idea, but perhaps Chet feels Swing is mature and wants to get into something new. He talks about the novelty in the comments on his blog.

Also he says the coffee is better at Adobe. He’s a good punster but I think he missed this pun/Freudian slip (coffee = Java?

I think Java will still be a solid choice but on the other hand people will look for alternatives more as well.

Hopefully other languages can catch up on this.

Jim Hugunin left the jython project very early on, in the jython 1.5 days (anyone remember that?); Jim left the python world, and went off to work on AspectJ.

Up to version 2.1, it was Finn Bock and Samuele Pedroni who maintained jython, and brought it up to version 2.1. (And IMHO, made jython a much more reliable product than it had ever been before).

Jim H only came back to the python world after disillusionment with AOP. There was a “meme” a couple of years ago that the MS CLR was unsuitable for dynamic languages. Jim prototyped a small python interpreter for the CLR, and proved that the meme was wrong. The day he published his paper about it, MS were on the phone offering him a job; the rest is history.

Jython stalled for all those years because both Finn and Samuele moved onto other things; Jim was long gone before jython 2.0.