Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Sunshine on Dynamic Languages rolls on

Lighting up enterprisey Java shops with Ruby and Python.

Sun is up in arms strengthening the ecosystem of the JVM. In fact the J in JVM is starting to fade away and is fast becoming the VM of choice for dynamic languages. I am sure, with Sun's hiring of Ted and Frank, invokedynamic is poised to gain more importance in the JCP world. After Ruby, Python is slated to be another first-class-citizen on the JVM.

But what happens to Java, the language ?

With more and more power of the dynamic languages being blessed on the JVM, are we prepared to see more and more polyglotism in enterprise applications ? BigCos and enterprise managers always like to remain sensitive to the platform they have invested in - you can implement in any language you want to, so long it runs on the JVM. In the days to come, expect more strategic support from Sun on features that will enrich Java, the platform, rather than Java, the language.

Next stop for Sun ? Scala ?

3 comments:

Germán said...

Isn't Sun working on its own Scala-like language (Fortress) for the JVM?

Unknown said...

Really ? Is Fortress Scala-like ? From whatever I read about Fortress, it looked to be a replacement for Fortran and mainly targetted towards symbolic programming of equations for mathematicians and scientists. Besides, it is not likely to come out within the next 2-3 years. I may be wrong though.

Germán said...

I may be wrong as well. In Wikipedia I read that it is indeed kind of a succession to Fortran, but also that it resembles languages like Scala and Haskell. I have no idea how well suited it could be for general purpose development.
It would be great if Sun showed support for Scala, that would help push it to the mainstream.