Let's assume that he is even right for a moment on all his issues. He is in an environment of people who really don't like any of these positions; yet he keeps bringing them up and pushing them in others' faces.

So you're saying that if a publicly funded research lab has a strong and vocal left-leaning majority, then people with different political views should just acquiesce? Well, from a practical point of view, you are right of course: there is simply no way to win in such a work environment.

Reasonable people just quit their job before things get out of hand. Many people who hold independent or conservative views simply get out of careers in science altogether because there are few if any work environments where they would feel comfortable. But let's not pretend that this is the way it should be.

The most damning problem in the ActiveState report is that the CLR cannot directly support a number of Python's language features.

C doesn't "directly" support a number of Python's language features and neither does the JVM. Yet, both of them have excellent Python implementations based on them.

But, I think that if anyone can pull this off, Jim can. The concern I have is whether he can keep the language alive. Development on his Jython project seems to have ground to a halt since the release of Jython-2.2a1 last summer.

Well, I used to be a very active Java and Jython user myself, but I just got pissed off by Sun's policies and have no incentive to contribute to Java or Java-related technologies anymore. I suspect many people in the OSS community feel the same way. And I suspect that's also the reason why Hugunin, a long-time open source developer and Java developer, himself is now building a project like IronPython on top of the CLR.

You will note that IronPython is not yet passing enough of Python's regression tests to work on many interesting language problems. Once it gets to that point, then I'll be interested.

It should require no more work to do that with IronPython than it did with Jython.

As an aside, I think in part, however, some of these issues are better addressed by changing the Python language; Python exposes implementation details (e.g., the use of dictionaries in objects) that make efficient implementations unnecessarily hard. I hope Hugunin will actually push for language changes and not strive for full compliance with Python's regression tests. Jython already had some beneficial effects on the Python language in that way.