It's been an interesting 3 days, attending the Lang.NET Symposium. While I expected to hear more on the typical Compiler Theory courseware, it was a pleasant surprise to learn more about the “Guts n' Gore” stuff under the hood, especially with the Expression Trees used by recent technologies built upon the CLR and DLR – most notably LINQ. 

I'll spare you a rehash of what was presented, and instead will focus on my “Alpha Geek” impression of where I think we (the collective “we” as Software Developers) will be going in the future. 

The Future of Java and the JVM

The talks at the Symposium heavily biased toward development on CLR and DLR technologies, with IronPython as the poster child of what can be accomplished on the CLR. As I mentioned earlier, Jim Hugunin made a compelling case for building for the CLR, and then optimizing for the DLR.

Thankfully, Java and the JVM were represented by John Rose and Charles Nutter. The Da Vinci Machine is comparable to the DLR, in that it provides extensions to the base Virtual Machine in order to supply Dynamic Languages. 

And that was about it for Java – barely an hour's worth of content about building Dynamic Languages on top of the JVM, supplanted by a brief rehash of Charles Nutter's RubyConf material. *Grumble* Oh well, considering Microsoft had the Home Court advantage, I guess the JVM guys had to pare everything down to that one hour. 

My final take-away on Java, the JVM, and the Da Vinci Machine: It's promising, but I'd really like to see other dynamic language efforts on it. Python and Ruby are given, but I don't see a JVM equivalent to Phalanger (php for CLR), or any early rumblings of porting Perl6 to run on the JVM. 

While the JVM isn't going away, I don't see it as being competitive to the CLR in the long-term unless other dynamic languages are being actively ported to it.  Any volunteers from the PHP or Perl camps?