Given the range of alternate languages available on the Java platform, and the quality of tooling for these, it now seems reasonable that developers could have more freedom to choose the language they work with based on their needs:
e.g. groovy for small in-house apps needed quickly jruby for web development scala/clojure for financial work etc. By targeting the JVM, many traditional concerns over changing languages take on far less significance; such as the need for a new infrastructure, lack of in-house operations knowledge and integration with an existing codebase. With the agile and software craftsmanship movements already empowering develops to make more decisions over process and planning (and to take responsibility for these), does it now make sense to also put more control over the choice of language into the hands of the people who will actually be using it? Of course, there will be management concerns. It's important to be able to hire future developers, and fragmentation could occur if multiple teams each chose a different language. On the other hand, are these considerations fundamentally different when choosing libraries such as hibernate, spring, lambdaj or lombok, or when choosing testng in preference to lombok? and is code reuse in many organisations really high enough that you can't already claim the codebases of different projects are fragmented? In truth, is the suffering all that great where we *already* use different languages for parts of a system (SQL and javascript anyone...)? Where is the balance here? Is it really still acceptable, in this day and age, for management to mandate that "though shalt use Java, and only Java"? -- Kevin Wright mail / gtalk / msn : [email protected] pulse / skype: kev.lee.wright twitter: @thecoda -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
