Sure java has a huge advantage given its been around since 96 and most 
people have not experimented and tried some alternatives. That said many 
9-to-5ers dont care about other languages and they prolly dont care about 
creating or contributing to the foss scene. After all that i believe its 
fair to say the ones who are interested in experimenting can fairly be 
described as from  the top echelon, the very same group of like minded 
explorers who give to oss. Scala, Groovy etc have been around for a few 
years and yet tehre is very little mainstream f/w and libs using these 
languages out there. Many new projects have appeared and ppl are still 
innovating and doing it all in plain old boring Java. Imwondering given all 
the benefits of these alternatives and so called improvements why hasnt 
anyone used them to create the new big foss thing ?

On Wednesday, March 30, 2011 4:20:18 PM UTC+11, Russel wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2011-03-29 at 17:59 -0700, mP wrote:
> > Im going to say something a little different. If Scala, Groovy etc are
> > so great then why are all the big items in JVM land all written in
> > Java ? Eclipse, Tomcat, Hibernate, Spring and so on. Sure there are
> > libraries that specialise for the aforementioned languages but they
> > are an ant compared to the big monster that is Java and all the stuff
> > that is written in java. So why arent there any big libraries for the
> > JVM ecosystem written in non Java languages ?
>
> Two reasons:
>
> 1.  They were written before non-Java programming languages became
> viable for production code.
>

Many great foss libraries have come out since the Scala, Groovy and friends 
have come out. Given the advantages of these languages surely they should 
have come out w/ something really big that catches everyones attention. In 
terms of the JVM platform i cant see any impact besides the langauges 
themselves on the entire ecosystem...
 

> 2.  Java is to the JVM as C is to native code.
>
> Arguing that all big frameworks are written in Java therefore non-Java
> programming languages are not usable is sophistry.
>
> We are now entering (rather than already being in) an era of
> multi-language systems rather than distinct  monocultures:  Java, Scala,
> Groovy, Clojure, etc. all have slightly different pros and cons, so use
> that don't shy away from it.  Because the JVM allows these language to
> interwork (almost) seamlessly, different parts of a system can be
> written in the language most suited to create maintainable production
> code meeting appropriate performance metrics.  This is the JVMs only
> real USP in a world still wanting native code.  Do not throw the baby
> out with the bath water by clinging to a Java-only monoculture approach:
> it matters not what current systems are written in when running on the
> JVM, only what happens in the future.
>
> -- 
> Russel.
>
> =============================================================================
> Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:[email protected]
> 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: [email protected]
> London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
>

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