This was another interesting find. -M.

"The story of Jython begins in the spring of 1997 while I was working on my PhD at MIT. While doing some benchmark work comparing the performance of Numeric Python to a variety of other programming languages, I was amazed to discover that Java was as fast as C-code for some simple numeric benchmarks. Previously, I had been uninterested in Java because I saw it as an inferior replacement for Python. Now I saw the possibility that Java could be a replacement for the ugly and error-prone C code that I was writing for the performance intensive parts of my systems."

http://hugunin.net/story_of_jython.html