Our friends over at Sys-Con, publishers of possibly the world’s most ad-cluttered Web sites, have produced what comes across as a sort of point-counterpoint on the JVM’s future as a multi-language platform. Rod Cope is very excited about JRuby, Jython, and Groovy running on the JVM. “In my experiences, dynamic scripting languages make it easier to write code in many situations. Scripting languages are much more human friendly than, say, C++. They lack all of that meticulous syntax. With dynamic languages, I am freer to do what I want — I can proceed without thinking as much about the nuts and bolts that go into the code.” The combination of these languages with the JVM is all the better — “it provide[s] a very intimate bi-directional interface with Java.” But is it all sweetness and light? Joe Winchester is suspicious. He doesn’t like the idea of having to switch between many languages — “I think that it’s possible to be a master of only one language – either that or a Jack of all languages and a master of none.” But his most damning criticism is that polyglottism will cause Java itself to lose focus: “If we don’t back Java as a language, rather than some kind of nebulous ‘Java technology’ thing, we’re just dooming it to incognizance by diluting it with other languages and just increasing the entropy required to build good software.” I’m pretty sure “incognizance” is not actually a word, but point taken. (This bit is particularly amusing to me, because Sun’s trademarking arm is fanatical about not using Java as a noun, and making you say “Java technology” as the most general name for the thing.) Software Development