The next big JVM language?

There’s an interesting thread of comments related to a blog post by Stephen Colebourne, who is giving a talk at this year’s JavaOne entitled “Next Big JVM language.” In particular, he and others note that the Fantom language could be the answer (I find this interesting as Fantom really wasn’t even on my radar. Until now.). Moreover, many of the threads claim Scala to be the next big language. It seems people still prefer static typing over dynamic-ness. Either way, I got the distinct impression, based upon those individuals that left comments, which, by no means reflects the community at large, that Groovy isn’t it.

Principally, the arguments against Groovy can be summarized as its lack of performance (compared to Scala, for instance). Not to be outdone, a few folks brought up Groovy++ (which attempts to add a bit of static-ness to Groovy ostensibly to increase performance). Nevertheless, the comments are quite interesting to read if for anything that Fantom is gaining mind share perhaps at the cost of other more mainstream alternatives like Groovy.