The Planetarium

One of the exciting things going on today in the technlogy industry is the proliferation of new computing languages. Another is that the JVM is evolving to run most of them really, really well. Most exciting is how the ideas between the languages are being begged, borrowed and stolen, to the ultimate benefit of developers writing all kinds of applications. The Planetarium has long been a subscriber of the Darwinian notion that diversity spurs innovation.

So it was interesting to see that Sun's own John Rose was at the Lang.NET symposium up in Redmond last month, talking about JSR 292, which you can watch here*, and giving an interview, which you can watch here*, about the new work to turbo-charge multiple languages for JDK 7.

And, no doubt, participating in the sharing and borrowing of good ideas with the other attendees.

Frank Wierbicki, Dr Jython, was there too, talking about Jython on the JVM. And there was a crazy rumor that Charlie hacked up an experimental version of the JRuby compiler over the weekend to use JSR 292's invokedynamic bytecode, coming to the JDK 7 builds real soon. Maybe there will be more from Charlie at JavaOne.

* You'll be asked to install Silverlight to see these vids. Just sayin.