John Todd wrote:Hi Mr. Bruce,
It is the trend these days to build languages for other platforms (CLR and JVM but JVM mainly).
JVM enjoys dosens of them: Clojure, Scala, Erjang, kawa, Mirah and the list is pretty big.
Do you think it is a good idea to build languages for JVM?
Do you think some of these languages will reach success and hit the mainstream or they are experimental and a proof of concept?
Thanks.
It really depends on the language. The JVM comes with some excellent advantages, like a wide user base, reliability, and good performance. But there's also some baggage when it comes to languages. For example, Ruby was hard to implement because some of the abstractions don't line up very neatly (though Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo have done an excellent job of smashing through barriers to make this work). Erlang didn't have enough primitives to make all of the reliability work like you'd want, and there's no tail recursion optimization for functional languages.
So I'll give you the cop-out answer and say,
It depends.
Thanks for your question.