I’m excited by the news that Sun has hired the JRuby developers.

The Java Virtual Machine is a strong, mature platform (at least for non-GUI applications) that’s benefited from a huge amount of research and development. The Java language, on the other hand, makes Baby Computer Language Designer Jesus cry. It’s verbose, clumsy, and restricting, but most of all inelegant.

Ruby, on the other hand, is a beautiful language without a really good implementation. The Ruby interpreter is slow, and its memory management is a liability—and it’s the latter that’s the bigger problem. That doesn’t stop me using it, but I’m very aware of its shortcomings.

I hope that, with the might of Sun behind it, JRuby will develop into a viable platform for deploying Ruby applications. I can’t wait for Rite forever.