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Python in Your Browser: Not From Who You Thought

There is a long history of people wanting to use Python in a browser. I have been one of those people. Of course, we always thought that this would come from Mozilla, who already has support for Python in their XPCOM framework (through cooperation with ActiveState), which their JavaScript components are also based on. It seemed that sandboxing python was the only piece missing to replace JavaScript with Python.

Well, here's a hit from left field we never saw coming (or did we?): Microsoft is giving us support for sandboxed Python in the browser. Silverlight is supposed to be cross-platform, so this shouldn't be an IE-only beast. When announcements were made recently about Silverlight, and included a note about a secret to be revealsed at Mix'07, I called the Python support. Now, sadly I can't prove this. All the comment that suspected Ruby and my comment suspect Python support seem to have gone missing. My theory is the guesses were too close, so they were deleted to keep the secret secret. I swear, the comments were there.


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