A lot of people in the community have been bugging Sun that they need to shake off the "Java == the language" view, and think more about the platform.
Tim Bray definitely saw this, and he pulled together a summit between top dynamic languages folk, and the main Sun Java players.
As soon as I heard about the summit I was really excited. When smart people get together good things happen. And it sounds like they did. Hey, there was even talk of adding an opcode here and there if it really made sense!
On Tuesday a summit was held at Sun, "with a few of our internal Java leaders, and on the dynamic-languages side, Larry Wall and Dan Sugalski (Perl and Parrot), Guido van Rossum, Samuele Pedroni and Sean McGrath (Python), and James Strachan (Groovy)".
There were a couple of action items to report back on this or that, but the take-aways were pretty clear. For my money, the important thing about the meeting was bridge-building; the dynamic-language guys now know who to shout at in Javaland, and the Java guys know who in dynamic-language land to pester about what works and what doesnt.
And I confidently predict that as time goes by, more and more of the code written in the Java ecosystem wont be in Java. This is a good thing.
Read more by Tim Bray on Dynamic Java
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