In Weapons and Coding, I made a prediction:
The first environment [Java / .NET] to successful mesh static and dynamic languages into a coherent platform will win the interpreted byte-code market.
Tim Bray must have come to a similar conclusion because he recently organized a meeting of the minds at Sun to talk about Dynamic Java. Here's a great pic of the BDFL and Larry Wall Tim shot right before they pulled out their katana's to settle the Python vs. Perl debate like gentlemen.
In my mind, Tim is moving into this small classification of people
labeled, Hero
. His past work on XML (as in, his name is on
the Recommendation), recent work on Atom, declaration of The
Loyal WS-Opposition, contributions through W3C TAG on the
excellent Architecture of the World Wide Web, and now this
seemingly unrelated initiative to get Sun to wake up about dynamic
languages puts Tim on the right side of almost every major area of
innovation I'm interested in. Go Tim, go!
I really hope this leads to some serious discussion on how we can
bring static and dynamic languages together into a single cohesive
platform. Drop the MFL is better than YFL
talk found in Every
Language War Ever. We need to start having these types
conversations: MFL is a compliment to YFL
. This is happening
only in very small pockets right now and until today, they were
pockets without a lot of potential for real impact.