Ah, trivia time! The VOC also had the world's first entirely privatized army. The "monopoly" cited in the README basically included a license to kill. Think "Google Armed Forces", but then scarier. The army was mostly used to keep a grumpy unpaid workforce "motivated", to keep the spice coming, and thus to keep that lovely 18% annual dividend payout reality.
Basically, the VOC made current evil multinational corps (e.g. the oil companies, monsanto, blackwater, etc) look like cute cuddly charities.
That said, it's been centuries, not sure getting worked up about the name makes sense now. It's a compiler, not a guidebook about how to traffic humans. I just thought the README section made the VOC seem a "little" awesomer than they were.
The enslaved the people and killed many, when they did not cooperate.
When the VOC is seen as basic example of corporations, it is a real gruesome heritage!
DeBeers[1] and the United Fruit Company (Chiquita)[2] would be much more comparable to a modern day VOC and also still exist. Both just seem to be better at staying off the radar since the advent of the Internet compared to Monsanto and the others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiquita_Brands_International
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company_%28disambig...
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2014/04/worlds...
It's up for debate who was the first multinational. No doubt both set the bar very high for those to follow, but I do think blackwater spinoff dyncorp with child sex slaves will take some beating, particularly with respect to the prevailing moral climate of the time:
Actually the Portuguese one was founded in 1549, but I will leave out the usual type of "products" that were traded in those days.
Perhaps by compiling from the bytecode of the existing interpreter, instead writing a whole new source code interpreter for the JVM, it will have some benefits in supporting newer versions of the language. Or, maybe it will help to decouple development of the standard library and the interpreter, possibly letting more devs work on it. You can't really be sure what benefits/deficiencies a different approach will bring until you actually try it - see PyPy, a "silly" idea to implement Python in Python, which now yields faster runtime performance than CPython.
Jython is awesome and all but its fighting an uphill war against rapid progress in 3 with far too few resources.
PS. Jython also would be called transpiler in modern lingo
To put it another way, Jython makes obvious sense when the primary target is the JVM and there's little legacy code. As target platforms proliferate and the code base becomes cruftier, it may become a less obvious choice.
I'm not sure the Pythonic "only one way" extends quite so far as to make Jython worthy of monopoly status.
So what did they do here? Is every object a dictionary to the Java runtime? That's easy enough to do, but no gain over CPython. Did they weaken the ability to modify objects so they could map to Java objects? That gets a performance win, as with Shed Skin, but a lot of Python code won't work. They're probably not doing all the stuff PyPi does; that's hard and took a decade of work by many people.
After ctrl-f'ing to the first mention of "Dutch", I had to chuckle at their explanation though.
Besides, it's not like most technical product/project names are so great. I enjoyed this reference & their pun.
I think the VOC has ceased operations a long time ago (as opposed to the Hudson's Bay company)
Snark aside, I think this is actually the case. I bet there are a LOT of CoffeeScript/Javascript developers who have never worked in a compiled language.
Also we usually use the term compilation (or more specifically Ahead Of Time and Just In Time compilation) for when we translate bytecode into machinecode.
