Little JVM that Could

During a session of Scala research for UCLA JUG, I sat back and took a look at all the languages that actually can be executed by a JVM (byte-code, other). Ada, Alef++, AspectJ, AWK, BeanShell, C, C++, Clojure, Cobol, ColdFusion, Common Lisp, Component Pascal, Duby, E, Fantom, Flow Java, Forth, Fortress, Frink, Groovy, Hecl, Ioke, Jaskell, JavaScript, Join Java, Jelly, Joy, Judoscript, LOGO, Lua, N.A.M.E. Basic, NetLogo, Nice, Noop, Oberon-2, Objective Caml (OCaml), ObjectScript, Pascal, PHP, Pizza, Pnuts, Python, Rexx, Ruby, Scala, Scheme, Sleep, Tcl, V, X10, Yeti... I'm sure I missed some, and I'm sure there are some that only run on highly specialized JVMs, but... wow. Talk about the little JVM that could. It makes me think back to the first time I saw the same Java code run on Linux, Solaris and Windows. I was astounded. And that was just Java; and all those other languages? What does this mean, really? Does this mean that complete, true environment-agnostic software development is here, and that we never have to worry about sitting down in front of an alien terminal with a USB of demo code? But then, what about all those different JVMS? All those different versions of different JVMs? I'm a wildly enthusiastic Java proponent, but I stopped my Scala research today and had a strange "moment". It was about 1996 or 1997 all over again. I sat down in front of a GNU/Linux system and compiled a single file o...

Date: March, 15 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/christianabryant/archive/2010/03/15/little-jvm-could

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