"So… how did you bridge the gap?" he asked.
That night, in her home office, she opened NetBeans out of spite. She created a new "Python" project—just to look at it. NetBeans, which had always been her Java fortress, now had a thin, dusty plugin for Python support. She’d never used it. She clicked "New File" and, for a lark, wrote:
No subprocesses. No string parsing. Just pure, shared memory between Java and Python.
And somewhere in the Apache NetBeans source code, a little-used Python plugin sat quietly, waiting for the next lonely developer to discover that sometimes, the best way to solve a problem is to refuse to choose sides.